Historicizing Life-Writing and Egodocuments in Early Modern Europe

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This volume historicizes the study of life-writing and egodocuments, focusing on early modern European reflections on the self, self-fashioning, and identity. Life-writing and the study of egodocuments currently tend to be viewed as separate fields, yet the individual as a purposive social actor provides significant common ground and offers a vehicle, both theoretical and practical, for a profitable synthesis of the two in a historical context. Echoing scholars from a wide-range of disciplines who recognize the uncertainty of the nature of the self, these essays question the notion of the autonomous self and the attendant idea of continuous identity unfolding in a unified personality. Instead, they suggest that the early modern self was variable and unstable, and can only be grasped by exploring selves situated in specific historical and social/cultural contexts and revealed through the wide range of historical documents considered here. The three sections of the volume consider: first, the theoretical contexts of understanding egodocuments in early modern Europe; then, the practical ways egodocuments from the period may be used for writing life-histories today; and finally, a wider range of historical documents that might be added to what are usually seen as egodocuments.

Author(s): James R. Farr, Guido Ruggiero
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022

Language: English
Pages: 334
City: Cham

Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
1 Introduction: Historicizing Life-Writing and Egodocuments in Early Modern Europe
Part I The Self Theorized from a Historical Perspective
2 Montaigne’s Elusive Self: An Essay
3 The Life-Enhancing Value of Life-Writing: On the Uses and Disadvantages of History in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists
I
The Nietzsche-Burckhardt-Vasari Connection
II
Vasari’s Exemplary Life and the “Lives” as a Form of Monumental History
III
The “Lives” as Monumental, Antiquarian, and Critical History
4 Benvenuto Cellini Magnanimously Corrects the Irritating Ignorance of Life Writers in General and in Regard to My Vita in This Letter from Hell
Part II Historical Approaches to Egodocuments: Strengths and Doubts
5 Conversion and Crossing Frontiers: The Lives of the Spanish Monks
6 Everard Nithard’s Memorias: The Jesuits Confessor’s Quest for Re-Fashioning the Self, People, and Events
Genesis and Nature of the Text
Fashioning His Truth
Fashioning the Self
Silences, Distortions, and Appropriations
Life and Afterlife of the Memorias
7 Egodocuments and The Diary of Constantijn Huygens Jr.
8 Writing About the “Other” in One’s Life: Life-Writing and Egodocuments of King Frederick William I of Prussia (1713–1740) as Historical Problem
“Self-Narration” by Frederick William
Wilhelmine and Frederick
The Father
“Self-Narration” by Frederick William, Again
9 Dimensions of the Self in Autobiographical Life-Writing: James Boswell’s Journals and William Hickey’s Memoirs
Dimensions of the Self
Autobiographical Life-Writing and the Self in Early Modern Europe
James Boswell and William Hickey
Part III Pushing the Limits of Life-Writing with a Wider Range of Historical Sources
10 Lives in Letters: Italian Renaissance Correspondence as Life-Writing
11 A Dutch Notary and His Clients
12 Genres and Modes of Women’s Life-Writing: Anne Clifford and Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans
Clifford’s Diary and the Great Book; Montpensier’s Memoirs
Portraits
Architecture and Monuments
Clifford’s Books and Marginalia; Montpensier’s Writings
Wills
Funeral Sermons
Conclusion
Index