Life-Writing: Encountering Selves

The capacious term ‘life-writing’ is further complicated by the early modern concept of‘self’as not an autonomous, individuated subject but rather as a communal construct that is crucially defined in relation to a series of ‘others’. Such writing does not sit easily within modern generic classification; however, if, with Meredith Skura, we ask “How did people write about themselves before the formal requirements of autobiography were encoded?” (2006, 27) the texts are revealed to be extensive and richly diverse. This chapter examines the discourses through which the‘self’ was constituted in this period and the material forms in and by which such texts were produced and have survived; bearing these issues in mind, it then explores whether and how such factors are nuanced by‘location’, ‘religion’, and‘gender’.Overall, this essay suggests that if we focus on the material conditions in which such texts were originally produced and pay attention to the means by which they have survived, they provide a compelling reminder of the alterity of early modern ‘selves’.