1 Meredith Skura, ‘A Mirror for Magistrates and the Beginnings of English Autobiography’, English Literary Renaissance, 36 (2006): 26–56 (26).

² Elaine McKay, ‘English Diarists: Gender, Geography and Occupation, 1500–1700’, History, 90 (2005): 191–212, usefully surveys the social, regional, and gender bias of the existing evidence. The phrases are Burke’s in ‘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.

³ Adam Smyth, ‘Almanacs, Annotators and Life-Writing in Early Modern England’, English Literary Renaissance, 38 (2008): 200–44 (218).

⁴ Burke, ‘Representations of the Self’, 23. Gordon Braden makes much the same point in ‘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: ‘the lives of the saintly bear a systematic disability … holiness has a way of blurring into uniformity’ (327).

⁵ See E. Pearlman, ‘Typological Autobiography in Seventeenth-Century England’, Biography, 8 (1985): 95–118.

⁶ Elspeth Graham et al., eds., Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen (London: Routledge, 1989), 3.

⁷ The image (NPG 710) can be viewed at <http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait.php?search=ap&npgno=710>, accessed 2 March 2011.

⁸ These figures come, of course, from Petrarch’s Trionfi and have a vibrant afterlife in the iconography of Elizabethan England. See, for example, D. G. Rees, ‘Petrarch’s “Trionfo Della Morte” in English’, Italian Studies, 7 (1952): 82–96.

⁹ Graham et al., eds., Her Own Life, 21.

¹⁰ Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 16.

¹¹ Ronald Bedford, Lloyd David, and Philippa Kelly, eds., Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 14.

¹² The Subject of Tragedy, quoted in Smyth, ‘Almanacs’, 239.

¹³ Mascuch, Origins, 15. Mascuch usefully quotes Benveniste’s Problems in General Linguistics: ‘In some way language puts forth “empty” forms which each speaker, in the exercise of discourse, appropriates to himself and which he relates to his “person”, at the same time defining himself as I and his partner as you’, quoted 15.

¹⁴ For accounts of this process in relation to Lady Margaret Hoby, see Sharon Cadman Seelig, Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women’s Lives, 1600–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 15–33.

¹⁵ Elspeth Graham, ‘Women’s Writing and the Self’, in Helen Wilcox, ed., Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 209–33 (214). See also Burke, ‘Representations of the Self’: ‘introspection and self-examination were not Protestant monopolies at this period … these practices were part of the preparation for confession’ (27).

¹⁶ Ronald Bedford, Lloyd David, and Philippa Kelly, eds., Early Modern English Lives: Autobiography and Self-Representation, 1500–1660 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 6.

¹⁷ Burke, ‘Representations of the Self’, 21.

¹⁸ Thomas O. Sloane, ‘Rhetorical Selfhood in Erasmus and Milton’, in Walter Jost and Wendy Olmstead, eds., A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 112–27 (113).

¹⁹ Sloane, ‘Rhetorical Selfhood’, 113. See also Wendy Olmert, Rhetoric: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), chaps. 4 and 5, and Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric, New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2008).

²⁰ The Art of Rhetoric, trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1991; 2004), 172–3.

²¹ Bedford et al., eds., Early Modern Autobiography, 6.

²² Bedford et al., eds., Early Modern Autobiography, 4.

²³ John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. John Buchanan-Brown (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), 115–16.

²⁴ See Seelig, Autobiography and Gender: ‘a number of these texts are both strangely recalcitrant as a source of information and persistently intriguing’ (9).

²⁵ See, for one example, John Collinges, The Excellent Woman: Discoursed more privately from Proverbs 31.29, 20, 31 (London, 1669).

²⁶ Burke, ‘Representations of the Self’, 24, notes the importance of physical appearance as an expression of the inner self; again, the classical model is in evidence.

²⁷ Sir Fulke Greville, The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney (London, 1651), sig. A3^r.

²⁸ Greville, Life, 22.

²⁹ Greville, Life, 25, 33, 48. The last quotation here alludes quite specifically to the elements of a man’s character and actions that combine to create ethos. See Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920), Book 6.1.15–25 (2, 393–9).

³⁰ René Weiss, ‘Was There a Real Shakespeare?’ Textual Practice, 23.2 (2009): 215–28 (217).

³¹ John Hayward, Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII, ed. John J. Manning, Camden Society, 4th series, 42 (London: Camden Society, 1991). See Danielle Clarke, ‘ “The sovereign’s vice begets the subjects error”: The Duke of Buckingham, “Sodomy” and Narratives of Edward II, 1622–28’, in Tom Betteridge, ed., Sodomy in Early Modern Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 46–64.

³² Braden, ‘Biography’, 322–30.

³³ Braden, ‘Biography’, 324.

³⁴ Wiess, ‘Real Shakespeare?’ 217.

³⁵ The Life of Antony, for example.

³⁶ Plutarch’s Lives Englished by Sir Thomas North, 10 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1910), I, 1.

³⁷ Plutarch, Lives, I, 2.

³⁸ Plutarch, Lives, II, 128.

³⁹ Plutarch, Lives, II, 128–9.

⁴⁰ Plutarch, Lives, II, 185.

⁴¹ A telling early example of the real effects of such proscriptions—and the ways in which they might be read against the grain—can be found in the case of Anne Askew; see The Examinations of Anne Askew, ed. Elaine V. Beilin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 29–30.

⁴² Bedford et al., eds., Early Modern Autobiography, 6.

⁴³ For a full discussion, see Eric Carlson, ‘English Funeral Sermons as Sources: The Example of Piety in Pre-1640 Sermons’, Albion, 32 (2000): 567–97.

⁴⁴ Mascuch, Origins, 55.

⁴⁵ See essays in Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker, eds., Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

⁴⁶ For a survey of recent work in the field, see Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle, ‘Recent Studies in Early Modern English Life Writing’, English Literary Renaissance, 40.1 (2010): 132–62, and their collection of essays, Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).

⁴⁷ Ramona Wray, ‘Autobiography’, in Laura Lunger Knoppers, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 194–207 (196).

⁴⁸ Graham, ‘Women’s Writing and the Self’, 209–10.

⁴⁹ Graham, ‘Women’s Writing and the Self’, 213.

⁵⁰ Braden, ‘Biography’, 322.

⁵¹ Skura, ‘A Mirror for Magistrates’, 27.