CHAPTER 26
DIARIES

ADAM SMYTH

IN the early modern period the term ‘diary’ lacked the generic stability it would later acquire, and this chapter will consider a range of texts (including chronicles, spiritual autobiographies, financial accounts, and annotated almanacs), all of which need to be seen as relating in some way to the category of the diary. Alongside this recognition of an interlinked network of life writing texts, this chapter will also stress how modern expectations of the diary as a form linked with intimacy, candour, and self-revelation are only fitfully present in this period, and are only gradually emerging across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: most early modern diaries were texts as much linked with the recording of actions in the world and public events as they were registers of any kind of inner life. As a consequence, the diary reminds us to pause in scepticism at many of the claims for cultural modernity implicit in the period marker ‘early modern’. The diary of Lady Margaret Hoby (1571–1633) of Hackness, Yorkshire, is a useful place to start because it raises then confounds many of these modern expectations of diaries, privacy, and subjectivity, and so illustrates how the diary was not yet the form we know today.

Describing her activities on Thursday 23 August 1599, Margaret Hoby wrote the following:

In the morninge I praied: then I took order for thinges about the house tell I went to breakfast, and sonne after I took my Coach and went to linton wher, after I had salluted my mother, I praied, and then, walkinge a litle and readinge of the bible in my Chamber went to supper: after which I hard the Lector [reading of biblical text] and sonne after that went to bed.¹

The term ‘diary’, from the Latin diarium (daily allowance), was in circulation from the 1580s, if not before, and Hoby’s text, composed between 1599 and 1605, seems to satisfy many of our expectations of the form. Hoby presents a first-person prose account, organized as daily entries, written close to the time of the events described (so lacking the lens of retrospection), recording the largely first-hand experiences of the writer. In other ways, however, Hoby’s text seems more distant: if we anticipate a diarist reflecting back on her own self, producing an anguished introspection and that sense of ‘the single and peculiar life’ (to use Rosencrantz’s lonely words) that contemporary culture equates with selfhood, then Hoby’s text resists our modern expectations. Hoby does note moments of reflection—‘I betook me to priuat praier and examenation’2—but the specific nature of that contemplation is rarely explored. Hoby’s diary is less a path to inwardness and more a logbook of actions across several spheres: she manages the manor and parsonage of Hackness in her husband’s absence; pays and supervises servants; works in the garden; plays music; reads and writes (annotating the margins of her Bible); offers medical advice to local residents; and helps at births. Julie Crawford has argued that Hoby’s diary is not the document of private retreat and introspection we might expect, but rather, a record of the puritan Hoby’s religious and political activism in recusant Yorkshire.³ Hoby’s diary is certainly dominated by religion: her textual life is a record of puritan spiritual industry, an account of prayers and religious exercises, often led by Hoby’s chaplain Richard Rhodes, and it conveys a sense that many events, including quotidian occurrences like mild illness, are products of God’s interventions: Hoby’s ‘febelnis of stomack’, the week before, is a ‘Iust punishment’ from God, ‘to corricte my sinnes’.⁴ While Hoby’s final ‘and sonne after that went to bed’ anticipates Samuel Pepys’s famous ‘And so to bed’, in most respects Hoby’s diary seems very different from Pepys’s descriptions of a 1660s life of secular pleasure—descriptions which are often regarded as paradigmatic of the form.

It would be a mistake, however, to think of Hoby’s diary as a resistant, unyielding text. The lack of inwardness is not a lack at all: for Hoby, the diary was not a space in which to describe interiority, but rather, a site for the recording of actions, prayers, and God’s role in shaping events. Many early modern diaries begin with, and remain preoccupied by, public events: the diary of Edward VI, perhaps unsurprisingly, records his official duties and royal travels;⁵ Walter Yonge’s diary opens with ‘5 November 1605. This daye there was an horrible treason intended to bee put in practise against the Kinge James the first’;⁶ William Whiteway of Dorchester started his diary after the appearance of ‘a Blazing Star in the South East’ and the 1618 execution of Walter Ralegh;⁷ and a sharpened sense of history, induced by events such as plague, Civil War, or royal successions, encouraged many to record the world around them⁸—like John Rous, whose 1625–42 diary opens with the note that Charles I’s ‘coming to the crowne was very joyous to the well-affected, but to Papists not very welcome’.9 Modern expectations of intimacy and personal revelation are often not met. The 1550–63 diary or ‘chronicle’ of Londoner Henry Machyn is a largely non-narrative record of public events in London, particularly funerals (Machyn was a clothier and often provided the trappings), and also news of crimes, executions, government proclamations, and ceremonies such as the lord mayor’s show.¹⁰ Machyn’s text is heavily informed by chronicles like Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble Families of Lancaster and York (1548)¹¹—revealing how diaries might be motivated by an impulse to record public history before they became personal documents of self-accounting. Something similar is apparent in the diary of Charles Wriothesley (1508–62), who, as Windsor Herald, witnessed and recorded many major political events: his first sustained account is a detailed description of Anne Boleyn’s coronation (‘The great hall at Westminster was rytchlie hanged with rych cloath of Arras, and a table sett at the upper ende of the hall … where the Queene dyned’).¹² Wriothesley seems to have conceived of his chronicle as a largely celebratory record of the monarchs he served and he provides a positive account of Henry VIII’s religious reforms. Henry Machyn’s text also owes much to parish registers. Machyn was parish clerk of Holy Trinity-the-Less, where he maintained the parish register, and its skeleton runs through his ‘diary’ (‘The seventeenth day of November was buried the old Countess of Derby buried at Colham, Sir Edward Hastings being her executor’).¹³ Indeed, records of burials remain the central, unifying subject of the text, and the format and rhetoric of the parish register informs many entries.

The regularity of Hoby’s entries and her starkly functional prose suggests not an absence of drama or imagination, but a commitment to a stable form of writing. Indeed, as Sharon Cadman Seelig notes, the very point of Hoby’s diary was to record and aid regular spiritual discipline: ‘[w]hat may strike the modern reader as … tedious, [or] repetitious … is in fact a sign of order, stability, and meaning in Margaret Hoby’s life’.¹⁴ The repetitious records, which seem to rob the text of a sense of Hoby’s agency and personality, in fact record her ‘self-determination and self-control’.¹⁵ Similarly, the muted textual presence of Hoby’s husband Thomas expresses not, necessarily, a loveless life, but rather, Hoby’s sense of the genre in which she was writing. It is dangerous to read diaries as sources for data without attending to genre’s mediations: the reader relying on Hoby’s diary would be surprised at her dramatic married life. At the time of writing, she was three years into her third marriage, to Sir Thomas Hoby; her first husband was Walter Devereux, brother to the Earl of Essex (executed for treason in 1601); and her second was Thomas Sidney, brother to the poets Philip and Mary. In those passages when Hoby draws on the cadences and sentences of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer—using an established register to describe her own actions—the diary suggests not the erasure of Hoby’s personality, but rather, the articulation of a sense of self through the use of available, biblical scripts. This writing of individuality through the adoption of shared, public templates invokes the dual meaning of identity as both sameness and uniqueness, and recalls that apparent combination of liberty and constraint in Catherine Belsey’s note that to ‘be a subject is to have access to signifying practice, to identify with the “I” who speaks’, while necessarily also being ‘held in place in a specific discourse, a specific knowledge, by the meanings available there’.16 That this perhaps seems a paradoxical practice has much to do with post-Romantic conceptions of identity as detached, introspective, and interiorized. But the idea of identity generated in Hoby’s text is different.

As Hoby’s text suggests, religion, and in particular puritanism, was an important catalyst in the production of early modern diaries. The Calvinist Thirty-Nine Articles (1563) decreed that each individual was infected with original sin; that only faith, and not good works, could save the sinner; and that double predestination meant God had chosen the ‘elect’ to be saved and the ‘reprobate’ to be damned. Many responded to predestination not with the passivity we might expect, but rather, with a desire to find evidence of God’s grace, and their election, in the smallest of actions.¹⁷ Protestant guides to spiritual well-being advised readers to construct records of their actions as a means to discern their sin and God’s graceful interventions, and out of these accounts of self-scrutiny, diaries sometimes emerged. In A Fountaine of Teares (Amsterdam, 1646), John Featley stressed that in order to ‘see my God with joy’, the Christian’s sins ‘must be seene by mee, and be bewayled by mee; in sadnesse they must’. To this end, ‘I will therefore sitt downe, and … examine my selfe how I have spent the day.’¹⁸ Featley lists thirty-eight questions—‘At what time, in the morning, did I arise from my bed?’; ‘What first did I?’; ‘What sighes, and groanes have I sent to heaven for pardon for it?’—which, once answered, will yield ‘mine account’, a textual record of little actions that, accumulatively, constitutes an account of one’s days.¹⁹ In his Journal or Diary of a Thankful Christian (1656), John Beadle outlined how to keep spiritual accounts and imagined a broader, proto-secular diary growing out of the process of spiritual self-accounting he urged on Christians: while the diary would begin as a record of ‘all Gods gracious dealings with us’, it might soon expand to include ‘the severall occurrenes of the Times we meet with, as they have reference to the Countrey and Nation we live in. It is good to keep an History, a Register, a Diary, an Annales, not onely of the places in which we have lived, but of the mercies that have been bestowed on us, continued to all our dayes.’20 Versions of this prescription are evident in many diaries. In the words of Alice Thornton (1627–1706), who composed ‘A Book of Remembrances’ of her life: ‘it is the dutie of every true Christian to remember and take notice of Allmighty God our Heavenly Father’s gracious acts of Providence over them … even from the wombe, untill the grave bury them in silence’.²¹ The young Samuel Ward (1572–1643)—future Master of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge—used his diary to catalogue his manifold sins: ‘Thy little affection in hearing Master chattertons good sermon upon the 34 vs. of the 25 of Math. Thy adulterous thoughts, that Day. Thy backwardnes in calling to mynd the sermons that day … Thy anger, agaynst M.N. for his long prayers.’²² Ralph Josselin—vicar of Earls Colne in Essex—titled his manuscript ‘A thankfull observacion of divine providence and goodnes towards mee and a summary view of my life’²³ and his record for 4 November 1640 reads: ‘came safe to Cranham. returning I thought of my thoughts at Huntingdon Bridge, and god had brought me back, increased with wife goods and parts, lo this was the Lords doing it was marvellous towards me’.²⁴ The paradoxical idea of agency at work here—actions performed by Josselin are, more fundamentally, actions performed by God—is a feature of many diaries.

Scholars often link this process of spiritual self-examination with an emerging interiority and indeed, this might sometimes be the case. A 1618 spiritual guide advised readers to ‘descend into your owne soules, and well … prosecute the examination of your owne estates; whether you be as yet regenerated or no’.²⁵ If a language of introspection and a preoccupation with self did develop out of these religions examinations, it was inflected by a lexicon of sin, grace, repentance, guilt, corruption, and longed-for forgiveness, creating a particular vocabulary of inwardness. But spiritual self-reflection need not only lead inwards. While a narrative of puritan-induced interiority has dominated histories of the diary, spiritual accounting might in fact prompt a recording of external actions. We see this with Hoby, and in those spiritual memoirs which include detailed records of domestic routine, reading habits, social visits, or health, such as the autobiographical meditations of Lady Grace Mildmay (1552?–1620), Elizabeth Walker (1623–90), or Lady Elizabeth Delaval (b. 1649). We see it, too, in the diary of Samuel Jeake (1652–99), a nonconformist merchant and astrologer from Rye who used his diary to record a torrent of detail as he attempted to discern God’s presence in his life:

Towards evening returned home: and by the way about 6h 30’ p.m. in a dark lane riding cross a descent made by a Rivulet of water the Girth being Loose, my Saddle for want of a Cruppier ran forward on the horse’s neck; & I was twice like to be thrown off into the water where being alone in the night, I might either have been drowned or trod underfoot by my horse, or at least have been all wet. But the good hand of God directed me to stop & retire before I was quite off, & the horse being very gentle did not impede it.26

In fact, Jeake’s ideas about God’s agency are complicated by his simultaneous emphasis on astrology as an explanatory framework for life’s occurrences. Jeake draws detailed horoscopes throughout his diary, particularly when dealing with money: he cast a sequence of horoscopes on 20 April 1694 when he bought tickets for the Million Adventure state lottery. But both Jeake’s attention to God’s minute interventions, and his interest in astrology’s capacity to shape all events, illustrate how the diary became a form preoccupied with quotidian particularity.

Wood-turner and shopkeeper Nehemiah Wallington (1598–1658), who lived and worked in the City of London, showed a similar conception of his writing as predominantly a record of God’s interventions. Wallington was a compulsive chronicler, compiling no less than fifty notebooks, of which seven survive today—despite frequently emphasizing the difficulty of writing (‘oh now, now … with the leafe I must … turne my dulsome pen with my shaking hand to wright other matter’)²⁷ and the potential sin of pride in his efforts. These extant notebooks include sustained autobiographical reflections, alongside other forms of writing: letters, prayers, and passages excised from sermons, news books, or the Bible. This mingling of genres, and a consequent sense of the ‘diary’ as a permeable form which bled, untroubled, into other kinds of writing, is also more broadly characteristic: modern criticism which too anxiously aims to set up a rigid conception of genre, and ‘to clear the air by imposing limits on autobiographical emissions’, ²⁸ betrays this spirit of generic unfixity and experimentation. Many diaries were prefaced with a retrospective autobiography that covered the life up until the point of writing. There were often overlaps between the diary or autobiography and the commonplace book—a text in which aphorisms, plucked from reading or conversation, were arranged under thematic headings to provide the compiler with a store-house of pieces of eloquence—as can be seen in the written life of the parliamentary general Sir William Waller (1598?–1668). In a bid to represent the ‘stormy sea’ of his life, Waller organized his account under thematic headings informed by commonplace books: headings such as ‘In Prisons Frequent’, ‘By Great Sicknesses’, and ‘By Hassards of War’, under which Waller distributed his experiences, cut up into aphoristic parcels, and designed, among other things, to demonstrate God’s protecting providence.29

Wallington hoped that his writings would ‘bring glory to God’, ³⁰ and his notebooks record his attempts to overcome sin (‘I have offen prayed unto God to lay some logge or blocke in my way when I am temted to sinne’) and express thanks to God for his interventions (‘And heere I did see Gods grat merci to me: that when I tempted one to comit sinne with me in jesting and daliance: but shee resisted me: and I was glad of it’).³¹ Events are significant in Wallington’s world as a means to uncover this divine purpose. Wallington also hoped his notebooks would be read by future readers (he wrote his first notebook ‘in Roman hand that others mite benifet by it as well as I’), ³² and in this sense, his remarkable writings are also representative: early modern diaries were frequently public, or semi-public records, written in part to aid the spiritual and moral education of family and community. Diaries were thus often in some ways exemplary, which complicates assumptions about accuracy, candour, and privacy. In 1593, Devonshire yeoman Robert Furse constructed a diary that aimed to assure future generations of the virtues and achievements of Furse’s family, and to bolster their legal claims to land: Furse sought to ‘sette furthe what our progenytors have bynne of them selves and spessyally those that have bynne wythyn this seven score yeres’, and hoped that ‘hys heres [heirs] … [and] there sequele … [enjoy] longe lyfe and prosperytye’.³³ And while no diaries were printed in the period, manuscript copies might circulate widely within communities: Ralph Josselin read, and was encouraged to write by, other people’s journals, ³⁴ and royalist Sir John Gibson (1606–65), imprisoned in Durham Castle in the 1650s, sent his written life out to other readers. His manuscript contains valedictions, modelled on Ovid’s Tristia, beginning ‘Poor little Booke, thou must to Welburne goe’ and ‘Thou must from Durham, unto Elston goe.’³⁵

Puritanism was, however, only one catalyst for the production of diaries: the popularity of self-writing in, for example, Catholic Italy indicates other causes were at work. Money is a second powerful diary prompt. In fact, religion and finance often overlap, as spiritual guides deploy a discourse drawn from financial bookkeeping: ‘[i]n thy selfe, for the helping forward of Repentance, keep a continuall audit, and take account of thy selfe and estate’.36 The instruction to ‘cast up your accounts’, as a metaphor for spiritual self-examination—‘cast up also all your wants, and see what at present you stand in need of’³⁷—is extremely common. The portion of the 1656–78 spiritual diary of Elizabeth, Viscountess Mordaunt, covering 1657, is organized into columns headed ‘To returne thanks for’ and ‘To ask perden for’—in effect, spiritual debts and credits.³⁸ Under ‘To ask perden for’, Mordaunt offers exacting confessions such as ‘I haue sayd one or to things that wer not exactely true.’

The early modern period was not only the time of Shakespeare, Donne, and Sidney: it was also the golden age of financial accounting, a period in which printed guides to inventorying money were popular and formative. The financial record was often an early stage in the generation of later diaries: a foundation on which the narrative diary was built. Samuel Pepys’s apparently impulsive prose seems to have begun life as a list of expenses which was gradually worked up into fluent prose: at two points in the diary from the first half of 1668, these earlier drafts survive in an unrevised form.³⁹ Here, from 10 to 19 April, and 5 to 17 June 1668, Pepys neglected to revise into narrative the sparse notes and financial accounts which provided the skeleton for his subsequent prose entries: in these moments, the earlier records, normally effaced, become visible, bound into the volume next to blank pages. Thus, for Friday 5 June:

At Barnet for milk	00. 00. 06
On the highway to menders of the highway	00. 00. 06
Dinner at Stevenage	00. 05. 06

And for Monday 8 June:

Father’s servants (father having in the garden told me bad stories of my wife’s ill words)	00. 14. 00
One that helped at the horses	00. 01. 00
Menders of the highway	00. 02. 00
Pleasant country to Bedfd. where while they stay I rode through the town and a good country town and there drinking	00. 01. 00
we on to Newport and there light and I and WH to the church and there give the boy

These early notes reveal the beginnings of Pepys’s famous text as a series of financial accounts, subsequently reworked into the supposedly ‘spontaneous’ prose we know today. (In fact, there is a broader, more complicated process of textual traffic beneath the smooth surface of Pepys’s text, involving many kinds of texts: but financial accounts are central.) The prominence Pepys gives to his finances throughout the diary registers the presence of these early notes as a kind of foundation under the later text, although, in general, Pepys effaces the process of drafting and reworking. But these skeleton entries let that process be glimpsed. The centrality of money as a topic in many other early modern diaries suggests a similar writing process was often at work: the 1616–19 diary of Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676) is organized not as continuous prose, but in two columns—a more personal narrative at the centre, with public and social events on the left—which duplicates the layout of her financial accounts.40 The popular perception of Pepys as someone who, in his diary, offers unmediated plunges at life—whose diary was written, in the words of one critic, ‘frankly and swiftly to get down what had stirred [Pepys’] mind each day’⁴¹—breaks down in the light of this evidence. Pepys’s famously impulsive prose was not immediate, ‘unconscious’, or unreserved, but was, in fact, the product of distinct and careful stages of revision.⁴² Pepys’s diary represents not spontaneity, but the artful construction of spontaneity.

The kind of subjectivity conveyed in diaries informed by financial accounts might also differ from a modern idea of inwardness. Pepys certainly writes about interiority, but many diaries informed by finance construct a sense of identity through objects and possessions, and so generate a subjectivity that is less about interiority and detachment, and more about things in the world. This recalls that Renaissance homonym, lost—as Margreta de Grazia has noted—to modern pronunciation: what one is depends on what one owns.⁴³ The word ‘personality’ has an etymological link with ‘personalty’, or ‘personal property’:⁴⁴ it might be a subjectivity, not of depths, but of accumulated things—as if Hamlet’s identity was not ‘that within which passeth show’, but his cloak and his tables. Such an alternative to that better-known story of alienation and depth is one reminder of the virtues of exploring a Renaissance that is not always and only proto-modern.

Financial records also influenced diary writing by encouraging a particular idea of truthfulness in accounting: assumptions about how to create a reliable record often migrated from financial accounting to diary writing. Hugh Oldcastle’s A Briefe Instruction and Maner How to Keepe Bookes of Accompts After the Order of Debitor and Creditor (now lost, but reissued by John Mellis in 1588)—a translation of Luca Paccioli’s Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita (Venice, 1494)—first popularized double-entry bookkeeping for an English readership, and a flood of other printed guides followed, including James Peele’s The Pathwaye to Perfectnes (1569) and John Carpenter’s A Most Excellent Instruction (1632). These guides forged a powerful connection between certain regularized ways of ordering financial accounts and connotations of honesty, clarity, balance, virtue, and truth, and these methods for constructing good records became common traits of diaries.

The accountant must ‘bee prompt and readdy’ in his recording of every single transaction, no matter how small. A ‘marchant may be applied unto Argus’, Mellis writes, ‘which as Poetes shewe, had a hundreth eyes’45—just as diaries became associated with quotidian detail. While some kinds of financial record might be collaboratively written, the financial ‘journal’ was to be the work of only one hand. ‘[N]o man is to write, but hee that keepth the Accounts’, ⁴⁶ ‘for in times of controversie he can best answer for his own postings’.⁴⁷ Guides to accounting thus encouraged a connection between the individual compiler, the privacy of records, and a reliable journal of events. In order to generate the impression of truthfulness, entries in financial accounts should adhere to particular rhetorical templates, such as ‘In the name of God, AMEN … The Inventory of me A.B. Citizen and Mercer of London, containing my whole estate generall, in Lands, Rents, Goods, ready money, Debts and Creditors which I have in this present world, at this present day.’⁴⁸ Diary entries are rhetorically regular, and this regularity is linked to connotations of order and trust. The pages of the financial account were to be full, with no space, since blanks suggest records might be added later on, perhaps duplicitously. This connection between spatial fullness and truth found its narrative equivalent in diaries that strained for the effect of having conveyed the whole day—from ‘Waking in the morning’, until ‘and so to bed’. Perhaps most importantly of all, guides stressed that good accounting is based around the construction of multiple, interconnected notebooks, and that records should be shunted from book to book, and revised in the process. John Mellis urged compilers to create an initial inventory of possessions and debts; a second book, called the ‘Memoriall or Remembrance’ or waste book, to note down business transactions as they occur; a journal, into which, every five or six days, the compiler should transfer this information, producing a leaner narrative; and finally, the ledger, or ‘great booke of accompte’.⁴⁹ This process of transmission and revision produces, in theory, increasingly regular records whose system and clarity means the accountant can tell ‘at all times, and in every respect, how his Estate standith’, 50 and so demonstrate his honesty, virtue, godliness, diligence, skill, and social credit.⁵¹ By compiling his accounts, an individual ‘in an Instant can see (as he doeth his Person in a mirror) his whole estate and in what posture it is in at the time’.⁵²

The practice of constructing reliable records through a process of transmission and rewriting lies behind many diaries: perhaps the biggest misconception about diary writing is that it was immediate and artless. We see this process at work in John Evelyn’s diaries for the 1630s. Evelyn began his diary writing by setting down notes in almanacs, ‘in imitation’, he wrote, ‘of what I had seen my father do’, ⁵³ and these notes formed the first, preparatory stage of his later diary writing.⁵⁴ This can be seen below: on the left, Evelyn’s almanac annotation for 2 July 1637, entered close to this date; on the right, the entry for this day in the diary, composed some time after 1660.

[July 2] A oxfor I first Receued the holy communion being yn in Bal Coll Chap Mr Cooper preacht55	Upon the 2d of July, being the first of the Moneth, I first received the B: Sacrament of the Lords Supper in the Colledge Chapell, one Mr Cooper, a fellow of the house preaching; and at this tyme was the Church of England in her greatest splendor, all things decent, and becoming the peace, and the Persons that govern’d.
	The most of the following Weeke I spent in visiting the Colleges, and several rarities of the University, which do very much affect young comers; but I do not find any memoranda’s of what I saw.56

Only two of Evelyn’s annotated almanacs survive—a third disappeared after a Sotheby’s sale in 1925—so it is not possible to anatomize the whole diary in this way. But even these brief instances suggest a compositional practice that has important implications for how we think about autobiographical texts: most fundamentally, that the production of Evelyn’s diary was less the direct transcription of lived experience, and more the result of successive revisions of prior texts.⁵⁷ Lady Anne Clifford constructed a series of closely related autobiographical texts which chronicle her lifelong, and ultimately successful, battle for the inheritance of her family estates in Westmorland and Yorkshire.58 These texts constitute ‘the longest surviving autobiographical record of the early modern era’⁵⁹ and include an autobiography, a chronicle, and a diary, as well as financial accounts. Each of these first-person accounts is, it seems, linked through a chain of transmission and revision: the financial accounts fed into the diaries, which supplied the chronicles, which informed the autobiography. If there is a tendency in contemporary culture, perhaps even a craving, to associate diary writing with immediacy, candour, and ‘guileless disclosure’, ⁶⁰ and if, as Laura Marcus notes, the presence in life writing of spontaneity’s perceived opposites—artfulness and literary craft—is read as a kind of falseness, ⁶¹ the accumulative, ongoing, deliberate practice of early modern diary writing suggests that these assumptions need rethinking. To put that more aphoristically: early modern life writing was as much about writing as it was about life.

Evelyn’s use of printed almanacs as sites in which early proto-diaries were logged, before being revised into fuller narrative, was typical of his time: the almanac was a crucial text lying beneath many early modern diaries. Printed almanacs were staggeringly popular: Thomas Nashe said selling them was ‘readier money than ale and cakes’, ⁶² and these cheap, diminutive, portable books provided readers with monthly calendars; astrological and meteorological prognostications; details of fairs and journeys between markets; notes of what were deemed canonical historical events; political chronologies; medical tips; discussions of the planets’ influence on the well-being of the body; and more. Almanacs were often interleaved with blank pages, on which readers added notes of their activities: their journeys; illnesses; financial dealings; and the births, deaths, and marriages of their family’s life. This is what Evelyn did—his bookbinder’s bill from June 1662 makes reference to an ‘Almanacke bound with pages Extraord[inary]’⁶³—and so did many others from a wide social spectrum: farmers counting their herd; elite women such as Lady Isabella Twysden (1605–57) of Roydon Hall, Kent; non-elite women such as Sarah Sale (fl. 1680), who entered detailed notes about money and agriculture after the death of her husband (‘I find in my Husbands Acomt money pd. for hay which I knew not before the money dew to me for hay is 5–0 the money for pease is—4 10’);⁶⁴ the tireless Warwickshire antiquarian Sir William Dugdale (1605–86), whose fifty heavily annotated volumes fed into many writing projects, including his autobiography;65 and John Dee (1527–1608), occultist, astrologer, mathematician, and adviser to Queen Elizabeth, who kept a diary through almanac annotations between 1577 and 1601.⁶⁶ The owner of a 1613 copy of Arthur Hopton’s New Almanacke (possibly a puritan minister called Matthew Page) added the following notes to the page for January:

I wen_^^t to Canterbury w^th. T.K.

This day Anthony was taken blinde: & his eyes

continued sore & swolne

this night one of my greate teethe fell out by y^e fireside

Goodwife Paine tooke Anth: to nurse

Anthonye departed this life about eyght

of y^e clocke in y^e morning 17

19 I went to Lenham to Markes Haule for

my wife hir breasts.⁶⁷

Many extant almanacs contain similar annotations: a series of staccato entries which don’t quite cohere into a narrative, as criticism generally deploys that term: as a representation of temporality which, in Hayden White’s words, ‘strains for the effect of having filled in all the gaps’, and which lends to events a moral significance.⁶⁸ One connection between these annotated texts and diary writing is textual transmission. Materials added to almanacs were frequently transferred to other texts: diarists often generated a life through a process of shifting material from text to text, starting with an almanac, expanding records with each movement. Many attributes of diaries are due to the later-effaced presence of the almanac as an early text in an ongoing process of rewriting: this founding compositional moment shaped the contents and form of later diaries. Almanac annotations often picked up on topics raised by the printed text: notes of political events; the weather; journey distances; and, in particular, records about health. The prominence of these topics in later diaries reflects in part a flow of influence from printed almanac to manuscript annotations to later diaries. In other ways, the dynamic between print and manuscript was more complicated. Early printed almanacs seem not to have envisaged readers adding annotations. The first printed almanacs to signal an awareness of this mode of consumption—Thomas Purfoote’s A blanke and perpetuall Almanacke (1566) (‘a memoriall … for any … that will make & keepe notes of any actes … Worthy of memory, to be registered’) and Thomas Hill’s An almanack … in forme of a booke of memorie necessary for all such, as haue occasion daylie to note sundry affayres, eyther for receytes, payments, or such lyke (1571)—came some time after the practice of annotating seems to have become established. Purfoote’s and Hill’s texts, which included blanks and encouraged readers to ‘make & keepe notes’, were responding to, and reinforcing, but not initiating this practice. Publishers had thus reorganized the almanac’s material form in response to new modes of reading, and had thus described a loop of influence: printed texts received readers’ annotations, which catalysed the reworking of those printed texts.

If religion and finance, therefore, were two powerful forces behind the emergence of diary writing, the willingness of readers to improvise in largely unforeseen ways with cheap printed books was another spark. More generally, the eagerness with which readers added notes of their lives to printed books reflects the fact that early modern life was increasingly organized around official written records: at the parish level, citizens would have been conscious of their lives being tracked in documents such as parish registers, introduced by Thomas Cromwell in 1538 with the radical aim of recording the birth, death, and marriage of almost every individual, no matter what rank. Rising literacy rates meant individuals might appropriate this culture of record-keeping to produce their own written accounts. If the administrative movement some historians call a Tudor revolution in government—the extension of a newly consistent level of bureaucracy to the process of rule—encouraged a sense of England as a record-keeping society, a culture committed to the production of textual traces, then the proliferation of improvised diaries and other life writing forms reflects the trickling down of this culture of accounting.

The archival turn within literary studies of the last twenty years has yielded many new texts, and has made it clear that an earlier story of the diary’s development, organized around elite male writers (Pepys and Evelyn) producing texts that seem recognizable to us, and that produce ‘a sense of the times in which it was lived’, 69 needs to be rewritten to include—at the very least—a much greater generic diversity and, as a result, a much wider social spectrum of writers.⁷⁰ Previous assumptions that diary writing was limited to the middle and upper classes, and that lower socio-economic groups lacked the necessary money, literacy, free time, and solitary space, ⁷¹ need revising if we recognize the overlaps between diaries and hugely popular texts like annotated almanacs. The point where, for example, a financial account ends and a diary begins, is often not clear, and it would be anachronistic to insist on a rigid distinction. Indeed, since manuscripts originating outside of aristocratic circles have a low survival rate, our sense of the social range of diary writers is still probably too narrow.72

Of course, this laudable emphasis on ad fontes raises problems of its own, not least in terms of access: the stress on the archives—prompted, in part, by a desire to modify the corpus of literary studies—means that those who can’t travel to these libraries, local archives, or aristocratic houses enjoy little of that celebrated sense of the canon opening up. Digital editions can offer a substitute, such as the online transcription of Elizabeth Isham’s writings—a vade mecum (1608–48) and a recently uncovered autobiographical ‘Booke of Rememberance’ (c. 1639)⁷³—or the 1550–63 ‘chronicle’ of Londoner Henry Machyn.⁷⁴ But it is an irony of current work in early modern studies—and in literary studies more generally—that an emphasis on the materiality of texts and the fetishizing of the archival real runs parallel with an enthusiasm for digitization projects which replace the real with the virtual. Indeed, a broader question which still needs thinking through is what, exactly, materiality means in the culture of the digital.

Why have scholars paid little attention to the diary as a genre of writing? In part, this is because diary writing often appears plain, unadorned, and non-literary, if by ‘literary’ we mean language that strives for something more than the instrumental. Diaries seem to lack the edges and gaps and obvious artifice on which criticism typically gains purchase. But even apparently functional prose has its generic debts, conventions, and rhetorical preferences, just as anti-rhetorical plain-speaking is an identifiable rhetorical mode. The neglect of genre is also due to the fact that scholars have tended to excise facts and vignettes, while paying little attention to the larger whole. This is certainly a tempting methodology: partly because excerpts can be so arresting (like Dr Simon Forman, on seeing Macbeth at the Globe in 1611: ‘obserue Also howe Mackbetes quen did Rise in the night in her slepe & walke and talked’), ⁷⁵ and partly because the generic heterogeneity of many diaries seems to invite a crumbling into parts. Thus, the 1602–3 diary of Inns of Court lawyer John Manningham might be read for its aphorisms (‘a wicked king is like a crazed ship’), sermon notes, epigrams, jokes (including one about Shakespeare’s sexual conquests), medical recipes (for ‘the windines in the stomach’), or its notes on a Middle Temple performance of Twelfth Night: the diary almost rattles with the many different pieces of life that came at this young lawyer.⁷⁶ The problem with excising is not only that highlights reflect the scholar’s priorities, not the diarist’s, and thus tend to affirm, rather than challenge preconceptions; but also that excising suggests that the diary is an unmediated ‘source’ that neutrally conveys facts—leaving the diary qua writing unexplored. With similar consequences, much diary scholarship has, perhaps unsurprisingly, organized itself around the authors of these texts, plotting (or at least implying) a direct path from the writing to the life. By emphasizing the writerly aspects of the diary (its rhetorical forms; its discourses; and its generic debts), and the sustained processes of transmission and redrafting that often lay beneath these apparently artless texts, we can gain a richer and more historically sensitive appreciation of that interaction between an urge to record the contemporary world and the necessity of following literary and conceptual precedents.

What role does gender have in diary writing? The puritan catalyst for diary writing was certainly seen as applicable to both women and men, and, as a result, women produced many spiritual diaries, as can be seen with texts by Lady Anne Harcourt; Lady Frances Pelham; Mary Roberts; Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick; and many others.77 Scholarship has been aware of this tradition, but this awareness was part of the reason why early to mid-twentieth-century scholarship paid less attention to the spiritual diary as a form. In a familiar circular argument, scholars convinced by a male-dominated literary canon, faced with evidence of women’s writing, relegated those forms in which women’s agency was apparent (spiritual diaries; translations; and religious verse) to bolster that existing canon. An awareness of a devotional diary tradition has also sometimes created a too-rigid sense of the kinds of texts women might write: women’s diaries need not always be texts of inwardness and privacy, but might also record political events (as Isabella Twysden’s did), or social mobility and visibility (as Margaret Hoby’s did). If it is broadly true that, as Sara Heller Mendelson has argued, women’s diaries tend to be organized around the household, in contrast to men’s diaries, which focus on public life, ⁷⁸ this was not always the case: Isabella Twysden’s annotations include ‘the 11 of Sep 1645 princ rupert delivered up bristoll on treaty to S^r Tho: farfax’. There is a danger that scholarship recycles early modern prescriptions about female behaviour. Recent work has demonstrated how women left representations of themselves across a range of written forms, including diaries, financial accounts, letters, fictional romances, annotated printed texts, and even recipe books, and there is a strong case for using the inclusive term ‘life writing’ as a way to highlight the connection between these various genres and to throw off unhelpfully static assumptions about restriction, privacy, and decorum.⁷⁹

The rise of diary writing is often linked with the supposed ‘birth’ of early modern subjectivity. Ever since Jacob Burckhardt’s Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860), the Renaissance has been formulated as the moment in which a discernibly modern sense of self was born—when individuals began to conceive of themselves as self-reflective, detached, and interiorized.80 Often Shakespeare, and, in particular, Hamlet, stand as epitomes of this ‘modern depth’.⁸¹ ‘[A]ll of us’, writes Harold Bloom, with a characteristic level of understatement, ‘were to a shocking degree, pragmatically reinvented by Shakespeare’.⁸²

One problem with this entrenched narrative is its unhelpful sense of medieval culture. Later periods are often made radical by scholars homogenizing what went before, and, as David Aers has noted, the supposed novelty of early modern subjectivity depends upon a misleadingly unified medieval culture, free from economic instabilities, class conflicts, and ideological contests, ‘a static homogenous collective … in which there could not be any self-conscious concern with individual identity or subjectivity’.⁸³ The Burkhardtian narrative has also led to an almost exclusive prioritizing of one model of subjectivity, based around modern ideas of difference, individuality, and alienation. But early modern diarists also constructed selfhood through a process of identifying, even overlapping, with other figures, narratives, and events. This is evident when diary writers recycle biblical sentences to articulate their own life, or represent their life as a rearticulation of former experiences: as royalist prisoner John Gibson did, in his commonplace book/diary, by invoking a coterie of individuals who represented the tribulations of the good man: Charles I, Charles II, Archbishop William Laud, John the Baptist, Ovid, Ulysses, and St John Chrysostome. All of these figures endured various forms of suffering and exile, and Gibson conceived of his life as a retelling of their stories.

If subjectivity was not necessarily a novel aspect of early modern culture, what does seem newly characteristic is a fascination with attempts to represent that sense of self: in portrait, lyric, financial account, soliloquy, in the ‘burgeoning … language of reflexivity’, ⁸⁴ in annotations added to printed books, in appropriated documents of bureaucracy such as parish registers, and, of course, in the diary. It is this culture of self-writing that resonates in Shakespeare’s plays, which feature many characters preoccupied with, and tormented by, finding ways of registering a life: ‘I am a scribbled form’, says the collapsing King John, ‘drawn with a pen/Upon a parchment, and against this fire/Do I shrink up’.⁸⁵ In this slippage between person and text, characters are characters in that double sense: both personalities and written letters. This is what Claudius puns on, as he frets over Hamlet’s letter telling of his ‘sudden and more strange return’. ‘Know you the hand?’ says Laertes. ‘’Tis Hamlet’s character’, Claudius replies.⁸⁶

FURTHER READING

Aers, David. ‘A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the “History of the Subject”’, in David Aers, ed., Culture and History, 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 177–202.

Amelang, James S. The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

Bedford, Ronald, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly, eds. Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006).

Connor, Rebecca Elisabeth. Women, Accounting, and Narrative: Keeping Books in Eighteenth-Century England (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).

Crawford, Julie. ‘Reconsidering Early Modern Women’s Reading, or, How Margaret Hoby Read her de Mornay’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 73.2 (2010): 193–223.

Dawson, Mark S. ‘Histories and Texts: Refiguring the Diary of Samuel Pepys’, The Historical Journal, 43.2 (2000): 407–31.

Eckerle, Julie A., and Michelle M. Dowd, eds. Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).

Marcus, Laura. Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994).

Nussbaum, Felicity. ‘Toward Conceptualizing Diary’, in James Olney, ed., Studies in Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 128–40.

Seelig, Sharon Cadman. Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women’s Lives, 1600–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Smyth, Adam. Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).