AMIDST the myriad definitions and descriptions that have come to the fore in recent years as critics and historians have become more and more interested in the discursive and narrative constructions of early modern lives, one thing is certain. ‘Life writing’, at least in any of the forms familiar to a modern readership, did not exist in 1550, but manifests in multiple and plural ways by 1700. It is not, of course, the case that writers prior to the seventeenth century did not draw on their own experiences, nor that they did not playfully insert their own personas into textual artefacts, but it can reasonably be said that there are few—if any—forms specifically devoted to the exploration of individual lives. As Meredith Skura argues
older writing about oneself appeared only in scattered passages and was incidental to other purposes; or it was allegorical; or it presented the author’s life as moral exemplar rather than individual experience; or it did not talk about the development of personality.1
‘[T]he author’s [or subject’s] life as moral exemplar’ is a key generic development in this period, and what is notable is the gradual broadening of the social base of who may count as exemplary. The exemplary does not therefore require to be placed outside the generic parameters of what counts as life writing, rather, it needs to be more thoroughly investigated as a rich source of relevant materials. The guises in which ‘life writing’ appear are themselves the products of complex events, generic evolution, and the hybridization of forms and traditions, but it might reasonably be claimed that ‘life writing’ (as a diverse, yet loosely affiliated body of materials) constitutes the first truly vernacular and properly demotic mode of written expression of the early modern period. However, it is important to note that ‘life writing’ was, by definition, only accessible to a relatively small proportion of the population and that exclusion from written forms of discursive ‘self-construction’ does not equate simply with a lack of selfhood or subjectivity.2 In other words, contrary to what most criticism assumes, the self may well be constructed in discourse, but it does not follow that this discourse is necessarily, or even primarily, written. This chapter seeks first, to outline some critical and definitional issues; second, to examine the origins, practices, and uses of what later might be called ‘biography’; and finally, to explore some examples of what Elspeth Graham calls ‘self-writing’, asking, in particular, why women found the business of writing lives (both their own and those of individuals to whom they were closely linked) so amenable and in what ways life writing enabled (or disabled) female agency.
It is useful from the start to displace some modern assumptions about what a life is, how it might be written, and the uses to which that written life might be put. Adam Smyth rightly makes the point that ‘the craving of modern readers for narrative’ tends to obscure the more complex, coded, and fragmented ways in which self-identity might be recorded and circulated in this period.3 Equally, the inevitable dependence of literate selfhood on inherited models and paradigms creates a tricky paradox in relation to both biography and autobiography in the period (and I suggest that the two modes of life writing are closely related, and that one is the logical outcome of the other), namely, the tension between the idea of the exceptional individual (the modern conception, at least until the latter part of the twentieth century, of the kind of life ‘worthy’ of being written) and the conventions governing the form in which that individual might articulate him or herself, or be articulated. As Peter Burke argues ‘[t]oday it may seem odd or even contradictory that the biography or autobiography of the unique individual should follow a pattern, but for readers and writers of the Renaissance, who were taught to model themselves on the exemplary figures of antiquity, there was no paradox’.4 Rather than an exclusive focus on the specificity of the individual, early modern life writing tends to the conventional and the typological, with certain constants remaining in place even under the pressures of ideological factionalism and political contestation.5 As the editors of Her Own Life (a seminal work in defining the field) note, autobiographies are ‘public documents with a social purpose’ as much as they are personalized accounts of interior selves.6 Inherited models, primarily from antiquity (Plutarch pre-eminently) and from religious writings, suggest the parameters for articulating the self, a series of categories that run the risk of reducing very different lives to some degree of conformity, as the commonality between, for example, the seven ages of man speech in Shakespeare’s As You Like It and the Unton portrait suggests. The pictorial representation of Sir Henry Unton’s life, by an unknown artist, depicts spatially what life writings express through linear (although not unilinear) narrative, with the key point being that the various events of Henry’s life are presented to the viewer simultaneously, without any obvious pattern of causation linking the events depicted. The events of Sir Henry Unton’s life selected for the portrait are divided into three main categories: education and career; death and burial; and interests and accomplishments. The figure of the ‘subject’ is present in many, but not all of the panels, and in the majority of them, he is dead. The figure of the deceased is understood primarily through categories that precede the life, to which the ‘subject’ is subordinated; the subject does not in any emphatic way determine or influence the categories that communicate the contours of the self to the viewer. Questions of topography are vital (a gesture perhaps at classical notions of the relationship between environment and character) and the life is envisaged as a journey, a set of transitions between different places (home, Oxford, travel in Italy, the Netherlands, France, and home), albeit one that is not depicted in a linear fashion (see the tangle of paths in the top right of the portrait).7 The Unton portrait is instructive, not least because it draws attention to the formal aspects of the depiction of lives in this period and renders them static, memorial, and exemplary in character; it also suggests the ways in which early modern lives are orientated in relation to quite specific parameters—the picture is presided over by the distinctly allegorical Petrarchan figures of Death and Fame.8 For all its charm and historical interest, the Unton portrait, like Jacques’s speech, focuses on externals, on surfaces, and fails to disclose the inner subject; the subject here is self-evidently performative, a cultural construction.
It is perhaps the writing process itself that brings the key parameters of selfhood into play, as autobiography, in particular, ‘raises questions about “self”, writing, “experience”, and literary convention with particular intensity’.9 Or, to put this slightly differently, it is in writing that we can see evidence of these processes in formation. Equally, it is important to recognize the degree to which such conventions are historically determined, as Michael Mascuch eloquently explains:
discourse, broadly conceived to include all types of instances of signification … is the locus of the sense of individuality. And because instances of discourse are themselves discrete events, mediated by local circumstances, it follows that the concept of individuality is historically and culturally contingent. The prevailing cultural and historical conditions determine the limits of what it is appropriate or possible to feel and state about personal identities in a given situation.10
As numerous critics assert, what is at stake is not simply the status of the individual subject of a life, but his or her capacity to exhibit behaviours and ideals that reinforce, rather than undermine, the status quo: ‘self-description … referred to understandings of oneself within a wider frame, and more often than not individuality was marked less by how one stood out than by how effectively one fitted in’.11 Thus, writing a life is often a way of ensuring that selfhood is seen to take socially acceptable forms and that ideologies are reinforced, rather than undermined by individuals. The place of subjectivity within culture will depend heavily upon what we believe about the nature of the self, namely, whether the self is thought of (in the post-Enlightenment construction) as autonomous, or whether it is understood to be a rhetorical effect, the product of discourse (and here the Renaissance shares some ground with the post-modern). A focus on one conceptualization of the self by no means ensures or guarantees the non-existence of the other, as Catherine Belsey’s formulation suggests: ‘to be a subject is to have access to signifying practice, to identify with the “I” who speaks’.12 The point is that the self, whether communicated in written discourse or not, is not in any sense a simple construction, and that the form of the ‘I’ in which it might be written or spoken is not itself a unique articulation, rather it is a shared, communal one: ‘In discourse, the ‘I’ upon which so much our sense of self is based appears as a grammatical form rather than as an elementary phenomenological unit.’13
The paradox that the self might be felt to be unique at the same time as it is expressed in terms that are anything but would seem to be a feature of self-writing in all periods, but perhaps has particular force in a period that comprehends the self through so many different frameworks, not all of them compatible. So, for example, many of the exemplary lives that we read from the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries derive their material from Protestant practices of self-examination and self-scrutiny, yet frequently comprehend the results of such processes within larger narratives of fall, salvation, despair, and transformation.14 As Elspeth Graham notes, ‘Calvinist writing is characterised by the presentation of a deeply interiorised, spiritual notion of self, constructed in complex relation to a watchful, interpreting self’, although as Peter Burke points out, this is not specific to Protestant writing in the period.15 To be exemplary then, points in two directions at once; it is perhaps to be seen to embody attributes that are universally desirable within a particular community to an exceptional degree, rather than to deviate from those norms. As Ronald Bedford and his colleagues state, the idea of the autonomous self may be anachronistic for the early modern period, but is ‘but one effect of numerous discourses and institutions that construct subjectivity as a nexus … a volatile intersection of identities, roles, actions, and beliefs’.16 One could justifiably argue that the issue is more to do with the relative status and authority given to different conceptions of the self, rather than that one notion gives way in historical sequence to another: for the Renaissance, however, the self was, to an extent, determined by its public and communal orientation. As Peter Burke puts it, self-identity might more usefully be seen in this period as ‘a tool for negotiation within the web of the world’.17
The ways in which these two conceptions of the self are inextricably intertwined is revealed by thinking about the key category for investigating (and creating) character that the Renaissance inherited from classical rhetoric: ethos. And it is this category, albeit in modified and domesticated form, that underlies the assumptions and structures of both biography and autobiography in the period. When individuals sat down and wrote narratives about their lives and their experiences, they rarely did it on the assumption that their inner lives were, per se, interesting to others; rather, they did it because they felt that there was something to be learned from their experiences. In the case of autobiography, particularly those authored by women, this process of articulation may well have been coextensive with the inauguration of the self, the identification of subjectivity through the process of engaging with precedents, models, and questions of authority. In turn, the value of those experiences to a reader or audience (as I suggest below, the funeral sermon was one site where life writing is found in the period) was predicated on the idea of the individual’s good character, his or her personal credit—in short, ethos. Ethos is ‘the means whereby a speaker or writer projects a self-image’, the cultivation of a specific persona designed to convince an audience (or readership).18 But ethos is not necessarily an authentic self, rather, it is a self narratively constructed with the authenticity effect, for it is this that renders the subsequent narrative convincing. In this way, then, selfhood is a consequence of ethos, not vice versa: ‘The writer/speaker must therefore have a sense of various character types and know which of these to assume to appeal to this or that audience in this or that situation.’19 Ethos is less a set of qualities than the development of a relationship between speaker and audience (or author and reader), and depends less on inner qualities than on the capacity of the speaker to make himself or herself credible, capable of being believed. Ethos actively encourages the production of personae, or the enunciation of the self in terms of already accepted roles: women writers venturing into autobiography frequently negotiate their authority by recourse to these socially accepted positions: for example, piety (Stubbes, Rich, and Thornton), martyrdom, the loving and loyal wife (Hutchinson), and the mother (Stubbes and Brettergh). The importance of this quality (for Aristotle it is ‘trustworthiness’) perhaps explains the sometimes formulaic nature of early modern writings about the self—their tendency to apologize for their presumption, or to explain away self-revelation—and, in particular, provides a rationale for the tendency of early modern self-writers to draw heavily upon authorizing frameworks that are social in origin: conversion narratives, saints’ lives, deathbed professions, and their roles as wives or mothers. The rhetorical category of ethos also bequeaths more obviously structural frameworks for the presentation of a life (and in this respect at least, ‘life writing’ might be clearly distinguished from diaries and letters, although in some cases these forms of creating records are drawn on for the writing of lives), as a glance at Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric will demonstrate. In Section 7, ‘Character’, Aristotle reveals the parameters by which a speaker might attempt to persuade an audience of the credibility of a given character (or perhaps, more precisely, a persona): ‘Let us after this go through the characters of men in regard to their emotions, habits, ages and fortunes.’20 These categories are still highly relevant in the description of character in the Renaissance, as writers seek to establish the ‘social and hierarchical structures within which [self-representations] … were understood and expressed’.21 Such frameworks are largely formal, and conventional, but ‘formality of style does not necessarily mean impersonality … impersonality does not mean lack of personhood’.22 But ethos for the Renaissance exceeds the formal dimensions of character, it becomes a mode of self-presentation, the zone of interaction between selfhood and external perception of that selfhood; it has little to do with factual or historical truth, but concerns itself with the cultural and social positioning of an individual in relation to others. It is rhetorical in every sense; a motivated form of self-representation (or representation by another) ultimately intended to be persuasive, if not didactic in character. Thus, Lucy Hutchinson’s Life of her husband is not only intended to rehabilitate him as a man of integrity, honour, and virtue, but to provide a careful, if evasive, apologia for her own politics. Accounts of individual lives, certainly in the pre-Civil War period, tend to adopt, implicitly or explicitly, some kind of ideological or didactic frame; the life is intended to symbolize something beyond itself and its subject: piety, good conduct, and political or ideological allegiance.
John Aubrey’s ‘life’ of the poet Michael Drayton provides a useful starting point, and an instructive contrast, for thinking about the differences between modern and early modern conceptions of how to write a life:
MICHAEL DRAYTON ESQ natus in Warwickshire at Atherston upon Stower: quaere Thomas Mariett.
He was a butcher’s sonne; was Squire viz. one of the Esquires to Sir Walter Aston Knight of the Bath, to whom he dedicated his Poeme. Sir J Brawne of … was a great Patron of his.
He lived at the bay-windowe house next the East-end of St Dunstan’s church in Fleet-street. Sepultus in north cross [aisle] of Westminster abbey. The Countesse of Dorset (Clifford) gave his Monument. This Mr Marshall (the stone-cutter) who made it, told me so.
Sir Edward Bissh Clarencieux [King-of-Arms] told me, he asked Mr Selden once (jestingly) whether he wrote the commentary to his Polyolbion and Epistles, or Mr Drayton made those verses to his Notes.23
Aubrey’s text, admittedly, is in note form, rather than in continuous, finished prose, yet, it shares various characteristics with more obviously ‘finished’ pieces of life writing and arguably represents one of many variations within the form. The first key feature that will strike the reader is the focus on practical detail: place of birth, social status, place of residence, burial place (this last a direct consequence of Aubrey’s own antiquarian interests), and the almost total absence of focus on what we might now call the inner life. This relative lack of what one might call emotional intensity is a marked feature of much early modern life writing, at least in comparison with modern interest in emotion and feeling.24 The second key feature is the dependence on oral testimony—not solely what was written or recorded about a life, but what was said and exchanged. Thus, the validity, and the value, of a life narrative might depend as much on the ‘credit’ of the speaker. So, on the one hand, Aubrey’s Lives roughly appropriate a set of inherited structures and categories for sorting and categorizing identity, whilst on the other, relying on reputation and personal credit. This direct connection of many written lives—whether biography or autobiography—with the communities that produced them, and, in turn, consumed them, is a key feature of many early modern lives, certainly of those that fall outside of the category of highly born and exemplary figures.25 Place, in its extended sense of both social position and geo-cultural location, is powerfully deterministic in the early modern period. This contrasts markedly with what a modern reader might expect from a written ‘life’; to be sure, concrete details about birth, domicile, work, and so on, but in addition an objectively verified account of an individual’s interests, proclivities, and concerns, based upon written evidence, along with more speculative interest in responses, motivations, and patterns. Early modern lives do exhibit these qualities, but in powerfully different ways, often seeing the events of early childhood through the lens of later achievements, as in the Life of Elizabeth Cary, where her later conversion to Catholicism is presented as having been proleptically present throughout her life.
There is little to discern in Aubrey’s account of Drayton the man, much less Drayton the poet, and Aubrey’s seemingly arbitrary musings about tomb inscriptions and the like seem to have little bearing on the kinds of things that a modern reader might want to know about Drayton. Yet, the form of Aubrey’s sketch merits a little more attention. Like other lives written in the period that present contemporary, as opposed to historical or classical, figures, Aubrey depends heavily upon testimony and anecdote. Likewise, a figure such as Fulke Greville, writing his Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney, derives a good deal of his own writerly authority from his personal proximity to Sidney, the idea that he has had privileged access to the individual concerned. The value of the life lies in the character of its subject, which clearly includes ‘blood’ and lineage:26
not only the Endowments of Nature, but even the Enoblements of the Mind, and Genius, are many times inherent in the Bloud and Linage. Some Families are privileg’d from Heaven in Excellencies, which now and then in particular Branches, like new Stars, appear and beautifie the sphere they shine in.27
Like Aubrey, Greville relies not only on what a modern reader would consider to be ‘evidence’ (books, letters, and documents), but on an already determined idea of Sidney’s ethos that is then presented by means of unsubstantiated evidence of his credit with his contemporaries:
Here I am still enforced to bring pregnant evidence from the dead: amongst whom I have found far more liberall contribution to the honor of true worth, than among those which now live; and in the market of selfnesse, traffique new interest by the discredit of old friends.28
Greville’s reliance on personal recall and reminiscence usefully reminds us of the didactic roots of what later comes to be called biography, where the individual’s ethos trumps all other considerations, including that of evidence. Indeed, stretching credulity, particularly where matters of the soul are concerned, helps to offset the necessarily conformist nature of many of these accounts. Not coincidentally, perhaps, the proximity to the subject that Greville repeatedly asserts serves to enhance his own reputation—and this credit by association is a feature of many examples of life writing in the period. Greville, in particular, is strongly motivated by his own self-representation as he writes his life of Sidney (although it was not published until after his death). Greville repeatedly uses the ‘I’ persona as he explains to the reader what he has selected and why: ‘An outward passage of inward greatness’, he writes, ‘which in a popular Estate I thought worth the observing’; ‘This Narration I adventure of, to shew the clearness, and readiness of this Gentlemans judgement, in all degrees, and offices of life’; ‘For proof wherof, I will pass from the testimonie of brave mens words, to his own deeds’.29 Whilst Greville’s presence in his encomiastic text is unusual in degree, it is certainly not unusual in kind, and the representation of a relationship between the writer and the individual written about is a decidedly new feature of early modern life writing, quite different in character from the modus operandi of the inherited models (although saints’ lives depend quite heavily on proximate testimony and witness accounts). The credibility of the account is enhanced, not called into question, by the personal motivation and investment of the recorder or reporter.
That this differs markedly from the classical models can be seen by taking a brief look at perhaps the most influential set of lives known to early modern readers, Plutarch’s Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans, translated by Thomas North. Once again, the lines of classification are not altogether clear, as one of the many forms that narrative history takes in the period is that of the life. As René Weiss notes: ‘For him the writing of biography and of comparative lives is writing history and, specifically, the history of the two cultures which most obviously shaped his own identity.’30 Historical writing in the period very frequently overlaps with what we might now designate life writing or biography: chronicle histories often included extended portraits of royal or noble individuals which became the prism through which historical events were refracted and narrated. Once again, historical writings were influenced by classical models—and these frequently adopted the model of exploring the gestae of a great man as a way of touching on broader political issues, as John Hayward’s Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII indicates.31 Thus, even at its inception, life writing was an elastic category that created deliberate and self-conscious ligatures between private and public, often as part of a larger ideological, political, or theological trend or agenda. This is undoubtedly the case with the kinds of models of biography that were available to early modern readers (and, in turn, writers), many of which derived more or less directly from either the classical model, or used a historically distant subject in order to draw parallels and analogies with current crises and dilemmas, or drew on a long history of hagiographical writing which proved surprisingly durable in the face of profound religious change. As Gordon Braden outlines, the early modern period saw a large number of translations of biographical texts, loosely defined, and these, in turn, spawned a series of imitations.32 He makes the important point, however, that ‘the early modern biographies and autobiographies that now count most did not attract English translators during this period’, citing texts such as Vasari.33 English taste, at least as measured by demand for appropriate texts in English, seems to have run more towards the exemplary, the typological, and the analogical than towards the exploratory. Beyond the great collections of classical lives translated into English (Plutarch, Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars, translated by Philemon Holland in 1606, and Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, published in 1632), there were a number of life stories of monarchs, particularly of Henri IV, perhaps because his narrative touched on so many topics relevant to English concerns.
Plutarch’s Lives is perhaps the best known of classical biographical texts, primarily because of its deep influence upon Shakespeare, and his political and stylistic indebtedness to Sir Thomas North’s translation, itself based on Amyot’s French translation. As Weiss asserts, Shakespeare’s interest in Plutarch is driven by a shared perception of ‘the relationship between life and history’, and this tendency to use the framework of a life almost metonymically to explore other concerns is a feature of almost all early modern life writing.34 In other words, it is not usually the case until the end of the period that the life per se is the primary focus of interest, rather, its exemplary potential is what matters. This is made manifest in North’s preface to Plutarch’s Lives, and its publication in 1579 suggests its role in providing bolstering authority to Elizabeth’s reign, despite the potentially troublesome parallels posed by at least some of the lives.35 Elizabeth herself is presented as embodying, as well as fulfilling, the various qualities of the figures delineated by Plutarch, a particularly interesting gambit on North’s part, as Elizabeth moves into a period of her reign where her gendered body natural is increasingly subordinated to her body politic, at least iconographically. North writes
who is fitter to give countenance to so many great states, than such an high and mighty Princess? who is fitter to revive the dead memory of their fame, than she that beareth the lively image of their vertues? who is fitter to authorise a work of so great learning and wisedom, than she whom all do honour as the Muse of the world?36
Although Elizabeth is posited as the primary reader, North’s preface makes it clear that the purpose of the Lives is the edification of the reader through example:
I hope the common sort of your subjects, shall not only profit themselves hereby, but also be animated to the better service of your Majesty. For among all the profane books, that are in reputation at this day, there is none … that teacheth so much honour, love, obedience, reverence, zeal, and devotion to Princes, as these lives of Plutarch do.37
The Life of Pericles provides a useful example of what the Elizabethans might have found instructive in their Plutarch, aided and guided by the marginal commentary. The Life opens with an illustrative anecdote, a narrative that provides the exemplary frame for the life to follow. As rhetorical treatises suggest, Plutarch then provides detail about Pericles’s birth and background (including the detail of his mother’s dream of giving birth to a lion). The Life proceeds through Pericles’s education, his manners, his character, exploits, key sayings, and so on. What is important about this largely conventional account, however, is its heavy investment in presenting Pericles as the embodiment of a certain kind of virtuous man modelled on a rhetorical, as well as a political, ideal:
he grew not only to have a great mind and an eloquent tongue, without any affectation, or gross country terms: but to a certain modest countenance that scantly smiled, very sober in his gait, having a kind of sound in his voice that he never lost or altered, and was of very honest behaviour, never troubled in his talk for anything that crossed him, and many other such like things, as all that saw them in him, and considered them, could but wonder at him.38
Many of the manoeuvres here are fairly typical, not only of classical lives, but of early modern ones too: the stress on bearing and speech, the idea of constancy in character, and the interpellation of the audience into an admiring role. Also typical is the passage that follows this, where this narrative embodiment of ethos is enlivened (and given external authority) by the inclusion of an anecdote—Pericles’s patience in the face of public attack by ‘a naughty busy fellow’.39 Certainly, Plutarch attempts to establish the credibility of his account by the inclusion of divergent views, but the rhetorical effect of these is simply to enhance and augment Pericles’s reputation; they are raised only in order to be dismissed. As North’s paratextual frame suggests, however, the purpose of the life is less to describe the inner self of Pericles than to exemplify qualities that chime with Elizabethan conceptions of monarchy by analogy:
And that most hated power, which in his life time they called monarchy, did then most plainly appear unto them, to have been the manifest ramper and bulwark of the safety of their whole state and common weal: such corruption and vice in government did then spring up immediately after his death, which when he was alive, he did ever suppress and keep under in such sort, that either it did not appear at all, or at the least it came not to that head and liberty, that such faults were committed, as were unpossible to be remedied.40
Thus, the exemplary individual embodies not only the ideal state, but an entire political ideology.
Just as classical texts bequeathed the Renaissance a set of easily recognizable types of virtue and vice, biblical texts were also mined for examples of conduct, morality, and behaviour. In the case of female examples, these were mostly neatly arrayed on either side of a binary split between morality and immorality, and were deployed in a spirit of familiar exchange of example and counter-example. Figures such as Deborah, Judith, Esther, Susannah, and Jael were used in various ways to provide precedents for female courage, leadership, constancy, and capacity to rule. Of equal importance for the consideration of the influence of textual traditions and models on early modern conceptualizations of women’s language are the non-specific textual cruxes of the Bible—the Pauline epistles in particular—where moral issues relating to the place of women’s speech are played out, with arguably real effects in real households and communities.41 Questions surrounding scriptural exemplarity are, in principle, similar to those arising from the classical tradition—certainly, many of the key hermeneutic methods of selection, commentary, and application are analogous—but there are also significant differences. In the first instance, the authority of the text is not in dispute, but its interpretation often is—and the grounds of the debate are often concerned not so much with textual authority, but with issues relating to historical or cultural context; the points at issue are concerned with the application of the text. Secondly, modes of transmission, with their explicit emphasis on the relationship of the individual to the word, often overtly include women as part of the target audience, whether through her reading a commentary or sermon, hearing them read, or via the husband’s role as moral and spiritual head of the household. Thirdly, the tradition of scriptural commentary, based around exemplary figures and key textual passages, hybridizes with a range of other textual forms to produce a generically diverse body of material that has as its end the translation of scriptural example into moral action in the world, even where this ‘action’ might properly be defined as inaction in the face of apparent temptation or provocation. Unsurprisingly, such examples focus on the woman’s role in the family and in the household, and stress the importance of proper conduct and the correct use of language and speech.
Exemplarity, of course, is an acknowledged feature of the dominant form of life writing in the early modern period. The lineaments of such narratives are surprisingly similar in many ways to the classical models, but with a number of crucial differences, as Bedford et al. note: ‘the texts in question are often underwritten by a patchwork of formalized spiritual and secular commonplaces that remark on the non-uniqueness of the individual’s sensation or experience’.42 There is a good deal of crossover and hybridization between different kinds of religious life writing, with some expanded lives tracing their origins to key texts like Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and others having a double life as single sermons or texts, and being incorporated in important compendia such as Samuel Clarke’s Lives of Ten Eminent Divines (1662). Once again, however, the life itself is a narrative framework through which to accomplish other kinds of cultural and textual work. One notable development in life writing through the period is the identification of relatively ordinary individuals as being somehow exemplary, their very ordinariness often enhancing their spiritual commitment. One textual form where this kind of life writing appears is in encomiastic funeral sermons. They are heavily invested in turning the well-lived spiritual life to rhetorical account, not only from the pulpit, but also through print circulation.43 The increasing use of contemporary figures as one modality of exemplarity suggests a particular kind of response to a perceived ‘crisis’; the need to enlarge upon the established authorities and figures by extending the illustration of virtues into the realm of the experiential—by and large, that many of these sermons, in the first instance, address a community that would have known the deceased personally. This is not to imply that the ‘living exemplar’ does not have a purchase well before this—texts like Foxe’s Book of Martyrs played a key part in the construction and circulation of types of virtuous Protestant resistance and piety. The figure of Lady Jane Grey, for example, was explicitly packaged to this exemplary end in The Life, Death and Actions of … Lady JANE GRAY (1615), her writings revealing the ‘never enough to be imitated virtues of that most admirable, wise, learned, and religious lady’ (Sig. A2r). What is particularly engaging about the exemplary women commemorated in sermons is that they are praised for the proper exercise of reading and writing; they are held up for emulation not purely and simply in terms of their virtue, charity, and piety, but the exercise of these as manifested in, and symbolized by, their use of literacy both in the home and in the parish and community.
Examples like these, linking biblical topoi—often, although by no means universally, derived from the Book of Proverbs—with the literate practice of an exemplar whose authority is augmented by the fact that she exists in the collective memory of family, parish, and community, abound in seventeenth-century writing, not solely in the rather predictable form of the funeral sermon, but in other emergent forms, forms that might loosely be grouped under the anachronistic heading of ‘life writing’—diaries, collections of exemplary lives, and mothers’ advice manuals. Samuel Clarke’s Lives of ten Eminent Divines (1662) includes the lives of several middle-ranking women renowned for their pious virtue; Mrs Margaret Corbet is eulogized for her reading, her catechizing, and her charity, and these good works are framed by references to the Book of Proverbs, 31:29 in particular (507), along with other scriptural texts and biblical figures. As with many of these sermons, the exemplary function of the text is enhanced by the inclusion of a brief account of the deceased’s life and character. As Michael Mascuch notes in his account of Stubbes’s Christal Glasse for Christian Women (1591), very little specific detail is included of Katherine Stubbes’s life, yet the text is notable for the inclusion of an extended first-person narrative. He claims that she is ‘one of the first ordinary people to have been (albeit posthumously, and at her husband’s initiative) identified by a voice individualized through an extended narrative performance’.44 His analysis contains the key points, namely, that this ‘self-writing’ is produced for a very particular purpose; the text’s multiple editions and popularity attest to the effectiveness of the use of the ‘authentic’ first person. This fascinating text also illustrates the proximity of biography and autobiography in the period, as the first-person narrative is incorporated and mediated by the framework that Philip Stubbes dictates. Many biographies in the period are simultaneously forms of self-writing—Hutchinson on Colonel Hutchinson, Greville on Sidney, and Walton on Donne, Herbert, Hooker, and Wotton.45 More traditional accounts stress this very continuity between forms, but recent criticism has tended to bifurcate them more starkly, as accounts of autobiography have been increasingly interested in the relationship between gender and this form of writing. There is not room in this piece to do this burgeoning area of scholarship justice, but a few remarks seem pertinent.46 One is that many of these texts share key characteristics with male-authored biographies and autobiographies, although the emphasis is often more squarely on private virtue and familial roles. As Wray notes, many of these texts have their origins in religious exercises and reveal ‘the continual documenting of spiritual business’.47 The category of ‘self-writing’, as practised by early modern women, is a notoriously elastic one and encompasses not one, but a wide range of forms. Graham, for example, refers to ‘the clear lack of any stable form of self-writing, which relates to a wider unfixity of genres in the period’.48 What this suggests, however, is that women are hybridizing different forms, using models that are proximate, at hand, and permitted, with emergent rhetorics for the self, and producing innovative and demotic texts. Without fixed, ‘high’ forms for self-writing to hand, women appear to exploit the fluidity of the discourses of the self in order to fashion subjectivities strongly rooted in the private world, whilst reflecting on and affecting the public one. This negotiation is all the more loaded and pointed for women attempting to contest the notion that the space of the household is merely private, and perhaps goes some way to explaining why autobiography held such interest for them. As Graham argues: ‘The exploration and exploitation of a variety of forms, rather than adherence to a recognized format for articulating the self, is the crucial characteristic of self-writing, and in particular of women’s self-writing, of the period.’49
In order to try and put some shape on the burgeoning and hybrid nature of ‘life writing’ in the early modern period, it is instructive to return to Aubrey’s intriguing sketches of key early modern individuals. The Lives is a fascinating text for the student of life writing in the period, partly because it marks a key transition between evolving forms. Whilst the Lives undoubtedly focus on individuals, rather than ‘exemplary or cautionary narratives’, pulling together broadly evidence-based facts and snippets about these individuals, it lacks either the overarching narrative and teleological frameworks that characterize proto-biography in the period (hagiography, for example), or the focus on a continuous, interiorized self that might be said to be the salient feature of modern biography.50 The chaotic plurality of Aubrey’s text(s), with their propensity to run seemingly unrelated details together, or to juxtapose fact with anecdote, provides us with a salutary lesson in thwarted biographical expectations that might usefully be extrapolated to the unwieldy and undefined category of life writing in the early modern period. It seems important to put some parameters in place as a prompt to further reflections. The term ‘life writing’ has been used here to denote exactly that: any form of writing that attempts the conscious representation of a life, whether written from the external or the internal point of view. The key terms, I suggest, ‘life’ and ‘writing’, are both in the process of formation during this period, and their relationship is unstable and at times opaque, yet, this does not in any sense mean that the early modern period does not have a sense that lives might be written, and of the multiple ways in which this might be done. As Meredith Skura argues
Instead of starting with modern expectations that predetermine the origins of autobiography by predefining its nature, newer studies have begun to explore various examples of a more loosely defined ‘life writing’, that is, any kind of writing in which the narrator is writing about her or himself. The question is not, ‘When was the first modern autobiography written?’ but rather, ‘How did people write about themselves before the formal requirements of autobiography were encoded?’51
This approach might also usefully be applied to the process of writing the lives of others, as both narrative types have their origins in the same kinds of texts, and similar humanist assumptions about the capacity of the literate encounter with the example to build character and boost morality. Both types of writing are closely related, each drawing to some extent on the rhetorical tradition of res gestae (as Skura herself implies in her arguments about the importance of the Mirror for Magistrates’ modelling or staging of first-person narratives) and incorporating generic elements from a range of other texts and traditions. Not all life writing appears in the form of prose—as a range of critical attempts to address questions of identity and self-writing in Shakespeare’s Sonnets suggest—and many early modern poetic texts are interested in complex games of secrecy and self-revelation (Spenser). Neither is it necessarily the case that life writing turns up in predictable forms; it is emphatically not a genre, nor is it unequivocally allied with the factual, as opposed to the fictive (so apparently lifelike accounts of the virtuous deaths and confessions of figures like Brettergh or Stubbes stretch credulity and subordinate it to the didactic function of the account). As work by Adam Smyth, and others, has demonstrated, auto/biography often appears on the margins or in the interstices of other forms, and may in fact be, in some instances, characterized by its embrace of the quotidian, the seeming arbitrariness of juxtaposition, and its lack of emotional depth as it apparently fails to distinguish between events that to modern readers seem hardly equivalent in impact. Such judgements, however, fail to consider the material aspects of keeping records (paper and books) or their function. Agency and subjectivity are subtly manifest in such accounts, but do not present textually in forms that are familiar to us: the task is to decode the conventions that structured the presentation of the self. Much as the poetic or narrative ‘I’ is as likely to be performative as authentic in this period (or at least to play with these possibilities in ways that frustrate attempts to map speaker onto writer), so too the terms in which individual lives are recorded are frequently heavily indebted to social and cultural norms and expectations, and their narrative impact is frequently understood (and justified) by their potential moral and didactic impact. The task for the reader, therefore, is to understand the complexities of textual representations of subjectivity, in all their historical complexity and specificity.
Bedford, Ronald, Lloyd David, and Philippa Kelly, eds. Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2006).
——— ——— ——— Early Modern English Lives: Autobiography and Self-Representation, 1500–1660 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
Braden, Gordon. ‘Biography’, in Gordon Braden, Robert Cummings, and Stuart Gillespie, eds., The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 2, 1550–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 322–30.
Burke, Peter. ‘Representations of the Self from Petrarch to Descartes’, in Roy Porter, ed., Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Routledge, 1997), 17–28.
Dowd, Michelle M., and Julie A. Eckerle, eds. Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
——— ——— ‘Recent Studies in Early Modern English Life Writing’, English Literary Renaissance, 40.1 (2010): 132–62.
Graham, Elspeth, et al., eds. Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen (London: Routledge, 1989).
Mascuch, Michael. Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
Seelig, Sharon Cadman. Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women’s Lives, 1600–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Sharpe, Kevin, and Stephen Zwicker, eds. Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Skura, Meredith. ‘A Mirror for Magistrates and the Beginnings of English Autobiography’, English Literary Renaissance, 36 (2006): 26–56.