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Essentials of Qualitative Methods
Series

Essentials of Autoethnography
Christopher N. Poulos

Essentials of Consensual Qualitative Research

Clara E. Hill and Sarah Knox

Essentials of Conversation Analysis

Alexa Hepburn and Jonathan Potter

Essentials of Critical-Constructivist Grounded Theory

Research
Heidi M. Levitt

Essentials of Critical Participatory Action Research

Michelle Fine and María Elena Torre

Essentials of Descriptive-Interpretive Qualitative Research:

A Generic Approach
Robert Elliott and Ladislav Timulak

Essentials of Discursive Psychology

Linda M. McMullen

Essentials of Existential Phenomenological Research

 Scott D. Churchill

Essentials of Ideal-Type Analysis: A Qualitative Approach to

Constructing Typologies
Emily Stapley, Sally OʼKeeffe, and Nick Midgley

Essentials of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

Jonathan A. Smith and Isabella E. Nizza

Essentials of Narrative Analysis

Ruthellen Josselson and Phillip L. Hammack

Essentials of Thematic Analysis

Gareth Terry and Nikki Hayfield
Copyright © 2021 by the American Psychological Association. All rights
reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976,
no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or
by any means, including, but not limited to, the process of scanning and
digitization, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior
written permission of the publisher.

Electronic edition published 2021.

ISBN: 978-1-4338-3738-8 (electronic edition).

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and such opinions and statements do not necessarily represent the policies
of the American Psychological Association.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Josselson, Ruthellen, author. | Hammack, Phillip L., author.
Title: Essentials of narrative analysis / Ruthellen Josselson and Phillip L.
Hammack.
Description: Washington, DC : American Psychological Association, [2021] |
Series: Essentials of qualitative methods series | Includes
bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020054985 (print) | LCCN 2020054986 (ebook) | ISBN
9781433835674 (paperback) | ISBN 9781433837388 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Narrative inquiry (Research method) | Social sciences—
Research—Methodology.
Classification: LCC H61.295 .J67 2021 (print) | LCC H61.295 (ebook) | DDC
001.4/33—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020054985
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020054986
https://doi.org/10.1037/0000246-000

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents

Series Foreword—Clara E. Hill and Sarah Knox

1. Conceptual Foundations for the Method
Stories and Human Experience: The Call for Narrative
Analysis
History and Epistemology of Narrative Analysis
Key Features of Narrative Analysis
Summary
2. Study Design and Data Collection
Research Questions
Recruiting, Interviewing, Analyzing: The Recursive
Circle
3. Data Analysis
Processes of Analysis
Orientation to the Narrative
A Sample Narrative Analysis: The Story of Lou
Reflexivity and the Analytic Process
4. Writing the Manuscript
 Typical Structure of a Journal Article
Representation
Typical Structure of a Book or Dissertation
Tips for Manuscript Preparation
5. Variations on the Method
Small Stories
Variations in Analysis
6. Methodological Integrity and Ethics
Amount and Contextualization of Data Collected
Perspective Management
Data and Research Question
Coherence and Groundedness of Interpretations
Ethics
7. Summary and Conclusions
Benefits and Advantages of Narrative Analysis
Limitations of Narrative Analysis
Narrative Analysis for a New Psychology
Appendix: Exemplar Studies
References
About the Authors
About the Series Editors
Series Foreword

Qualitative approaches have become accepted and indeed

embraced as empirical methods within the social sciences, as
scholars have realized that many of the phenomena in which we
are interested are complex and require deep inner reflection
and equally penetrating examination. Quantitative approaches
often cannot capture such phenomena well through their
standard methods (e.g., self-report measures), so qualitative
designs using interviews and other in-depth data-gathering
procedures offer exciting, nimble, and useful research
approaches.
Indeed, the number and variety of qualitative approaches
that have been developed is remarkable. We remember Bill
Stiles saying (quoting Chairman Mao) at one meeting about
methods, “Let a hundred flowers bloom,” indicating that
there are many appropriate methods for addressing research
questions. In this series, we celebrate this diversity
(hence, the cover design of flowers).
 The question for many of us, though, has been how to
decide among approaches and how to learn the different
methods. Many prior descriptions of the various qualitative
methods have not provided clear enough descriptions of the
methods, making it difficult for novice researchers to learn
how to use them. Thus, those interested in learning about and
pursuing qualitative research need crisp and thorough
descriptions of these approaches, with lots of examples to
illustrate the method so that readers can grasp how to use
the methods.
The purpose of this series of books, then, is to present a
range of qualitative approaches that seemed most exciting and
illustrative of the range of methods appropriate for social
science research. We asked leading experts in qualitative
methods to contribute to the series, and we were delighted
that they accepted our invitation. Through this series,
readers have the opportunity to learn qualitative research
methods from those who developed the methods and/or who have
been using them successfully for years.
We asked the authors of each book to provide context for
the method, including a rationale, situating the method
within the qualitative tradition, describing the methodʼs
philosophical and epistemological background, and noting the
key features of the method. We then asked them to describe in
detail the steps of the method, including the research team,
sampling, biases and expectations, data collection, data
analysis, and variations on the method. We also asked authors
to provide tips for the research process and for writing a
manuscript emerging from a study that used the method.
Finally, we asked authors to reflect on the methodological
integrity of the approach, along with the benefits and
limitations of the particular method.
 This series of books can be used in several different
ways. Instructors teaching courses in qualitative research
could use the whole series, presenting one method at a time
to expose students to a range of qualitative methods.
Alternatively, instructors could choose to focus on just a
few approaches, as depicted in specific books, supplementing
the books with examples from studies that have been published
using the approaches, and providing experiential exercises to
help students get started using the approaches.
This book describes narrative analysis, a qualitative
method that focuses on the individual as the unit of
analysis, closely examines individualsʼ “voices” via their
narrative data, and explores how individuals make meaning of
their life experiences. Ruthellen Josselson and Phillip L.
Hammack describe the methodʼs pursuit of understanding how
people make meaning of their experiences; reliance on rich
narrative data; adoption of a holistic, person-centered
approach that emphasizes particularity and diversity; use of
interpretation, induction, and discovery rather than
deduction and confirmation; integration of the analysis of
implicit and explicit meaning; and attention to
coconstruction of meaning. Benefits of the approach include
the preservation of the individual as the unit of analysis in
exploring questions related to meaning of experiences.

—Clara E. Hill and Sarah Knox

1
CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATIONS FOR THE
METHOD

In his early 20s, a young man we will call Lou found himself
in an emergency room. He was hospitalized for “amphetamine
psychosis.” At the hospital, he was hallucinating. He saw a
cup with the name “Maria” on it—his motherʼs name. At that
moment—the lowest of his life—he remembered something his
father had told him: “Your mother wanted to abort you.” He
was devastated, overcome with feelings of worthlessness. A
few weeks later, after his release from the hospital, a
friend invited him to get out of the city. They ascended a
mountaintop. Lou took in the view. It was not one he had
experienced much. He was a “city boy.” He was overcome with
a feeling of oneness with nature, and he determined to leave
drug use behind him. Over 30 years later, he narrated this
life story. Lou has not abused drugs for the past 30 years,
but he has experienced—and overcome—plenty of other
challenges.
How do we understand how Lou descended to his place of
extreme worthlessness? How was he able to overcome this
experience and create a life story characterized by
resilience? How did Lou make meaning of this challenging
moment in his life? Lou is a gay Mexican American man in his
50s who experienced most of his adulthood during the AIDS
epidemic and the extraordinary stigma gay men experienced in
the 1980s and 1990s. What role does identity (e.g.,
experience of gender, sexuality, race or ethnicity), culture
(e.g., expectations and practices associated with being
Mexican American), and history (e.g., the backdrop of the
AIDS epidemic and its extraordinary stigma for gay men)
assume in Louʼs meaning making?
The method we describe in this book— narrative analysis —
is uniquely positioned to answer these kinds of questions.
The version of narrative analysis we outline in this book is
a method that centers the individual as the unit of scrutiny,
preserves the voice of the individual through close analysis
and presentation of narrative data, and investigates how
individuals make meaning of lifeʼs challenges and
opportunities. The method fully contextualizes lives in a
manner that affords analysis of such critical aspects of the
self as culture, identity, and history. We return to Louʼs
story in Chapter 3 for a sample narrative analysis.
Narrative analysis is a method with a particular history
and epistemology, and it is designed to answer certain types
of research questions. As part of the growing recognition of
the value and legitimacy of qualitative inquiry in
psychology, narrative analysis is becoming increasingly
articulated and refined. This book represents an effort to
stimulate new investigators or seasoned investigators who
want to stretch their methodological expertise to consider
narrative analysis.
It is important to note that “narrative” is a broad
concept in psychology, concerned with the role of stories in
personality, human development, and psychological experience.
Sarbin (1986) suggested that narrative be considered a root
metaphor for psychology because human beings impose structure
on the flow of experience by organizing accounts of actions
into narratives. Bruner (2004) took this idea further by
declaring that we live our lives as stories. More recently,
scholars in personality, social, and developmental psychology
have used narrative to describe any form of data collection
that uses stories, regardless of the analytic approach (e.g.,
Adler et al., 2017; McLean et al., 2020; Rogers, 2020). In
this book, although we make some links to these broader ideas
in narrative psychology, we focus on narrative analysis as a
qualitative method.
STORIES AND HUMAN EXPERIENCE: THE CALL FOR NARRATIVE
ANALYSIS
Stories are central to human experience. We create stories of
ourselves to connect our actions, mark our identities,
distinguish ourselves from others, and link past, present,
and, perhaps, future. Across cultures and historical eras,
from childhood to old age, we engage in storytelling to make
meaning of life and our place within a larger social system.
We inhabit a world in which experience is mediated through
language, and our sensemaking process depends on the
construction and internalization of speech in narrative form
(e.g., Bruner, 1990). The mind depends on narrative meaning
making for a sense of coherence, unity, and purpose in life
(e.g., McAdams, 2011; McAdams & McLean, 2013).
As one form of qualitative method in psychology, narrative
analysis provides a window into meaning making as a
fundamental process of human development. Narrative analysis
investigates texts that tell stories about peopleʼs lives,
maintaining an analytic focus on the concept of meaning —how
individuals position themselves in their worlds and make
sense of themselves through stories.
Narrative research is premised on the idea that people
live and/or understand their lives in storied forms,
connecting events in the manner of a plot that has beginning,
middle, and end points (Sarbin, 1986). In its simplest form,
our experience is internally ordered as “this happened, then
that happened,” with some (often causal) connecting link in
between. These stories are not constructed in isolation,
however. Embedded in a particular culture, the stories we
make represent variations on circulating narratives
constrained by social expectation (Hammack & Toolis, 2019).
For example, there are expectations about the structure and
content of a “good” autobiographical narrative (McLean &
Syed, 2015). There is cultural meaning ascribed to the
particular social categories we inhabit—categories such as
gender, race, class, and sexual identity (Hammack, 2008;
Randall, 2015; Rogers, 2020). In other words, people
construct narratives from a highly particular social position
(e.g., a debutante, a gay man, or an unhoused person).
HISTORY AND EPISTEMOLOGY OF NARRATIVE ANALYSIS
Narrative theory—an effort to study the various structures,
elements, uses, and effects of narrative—emerged in the
1970s in fields such as philosophy, history, literature, and
psychoanalysis (e.g., Dray, 1971; Kermode, 1979; MacIntyre,
1977). The 1980s saw an explosion of theoretical work on
narrative in psychology, with the growing recognition that
psychology needed to center meaning, intentionality, and
language in the study of the whole person (e.g., Bruner,
1986, 2004; Cohler, 1982; Freeman, 1984; K. Gergen & Gergen,
1983; McAdams, 1988; Polkinghorne, 1988; Sarbin, 1986). Ideas
about the self consisting of multiple “voices” in dialogue
with one another (e.g., Bakhtin, 1981; Hermans & Kempen,
1993; Vygotsky, 1978) became influential to narrative
researchers.
The 1990s saw several paradigmatic statements and
empirical works in narrative psychology, spanning subfields
of the discipline, including clinical (e.g., Howard, 1991),
cognitive (e.g., Bruner, 1990), community (e.g., Rappaport,
1995), developmental (e.g., Josselson, 1996b), personality
(e.g., McAdams, 1993; Singer, 1995), and social psychology
(e.g., Baumeister & Newman, 1994). In the 21st century,
narrative psychology has broadened to foreground life stories
as culturally embedded, recognizing variability in identity
development across cultural contexts (e.g., Hammack, 2011;
McAdams & Guo, 2017). Importantly, researchers have
increasingly acknowledged how narratives are constrained by
power and social location on axes such as race and class
(e.g., Bhatia, 2018; Hammack & Toolis, 2015).
 To fully situate narrative analysis in the history of
psychological science and its methodological and
epistemological traditions, one must return to the birth of
modern psychology in the late 19th century. William James
(1890) envisioned psychology as a “natural science”
examining mechanical mental processes in parallel to physics
and chemistry. Wilhelm Wundt (1897, 1916) acknowledged a
greater purview for psychology with his proposal for two
distinct branches—the “experimental,” which would use
scientific methods, and the “cultural,” which would use
naturalistic and historical methods. A third, often
forgotten, approach to psychology was articulated by late
19th-century philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1988). Dilthey
argued that psychology ought to be a “human science”
chiefly concerned with meaning making. Diltheyʼs vision of a
hermeneutic psychological science was an interpretive one—
one in which data would be subject to inductive analysis to
understand human action and experience in context (Tappan,
1997). Diltheyʼs psychology eschewed the positivist or
postpositivist quest for generalizable laws in favor of a
contextualist, interpretive analysis of experience in
context.
The epistemology of contemporary narrative analysis
follows Diltheyʼs original vision in its primarily inductive
and hermeneutic (i.e., interpretive) approach to data
analysis. Hermeneutics is the science of meaning (e.g.,
Gadamer, 1976). The goal is to extract both the explicit and
implicit meanings in texts (Josselson, 2004) and to do so
with an analytic openness that facilitates the discovery of
new knowledge. For example, when we consider Louʼs narrative
of drug abuse, we analyze not only his account of the meaning
of this nadir in his life story but also the themes that lie
beneath the surface of his account (e.g., his relationship
with his mother).
The meanings individuals make of life events occur in
social context and historical time. Contemporary narrative
analysis builds on Diltheyʼs philosophical foundation and is
also influenced by the social constructionist movement of the
20th century that emphasized how reality is built through
negotiation among people in a social context (see K. J.
Gergen, 1985). This negotiation occurs through language in
interaction—a social process that relies on joint meaning
making (e.g., Vygotsky, 1934/1962).
Narrative analysts recognize that stories are recounted in
a particular context (M. Gergen, 2001; Mishler, 1986) and
often with a particular purpose. Thus, the focus is not only
on the content of what is communicated in the narrative but
also on how the narrator constructs the story, from what
social locations the narrator speaks, and what impact on the
audience may be intended. For example, a woman may recount,
in a humorous tone to her friends, a story about how her
father got angry at her, stopped the car, and made her get
out and walk home. She may emphasize the amusing people she
encountered on her walk. This same woman may tell the same
story to her therapist as an example of her fatherʼs
irrationality and abuse of her and how frightened she was of
the people she encountered in the dangerous neighborhood she
walked through.
Most narrative researchers agree with Spenceʼs (1984)
distinction between narrative truth and historical truth.
Narrative truth involves a constructed account of experience,
not a factual record of what “really” happened. The focus
is on how events are remembered, connected to one another,
and understood in relation to a personʼs life course and
position in society, culture, and time. The question of
“accuracy” is not the focus in narrative analysis. What
matters is how the individual constructs meaning about life
events through narrative. In this way, narrative analysis is
aligned with an interpretive, constructionist epistemology
rather than an essentialist, realist epistemology typically
associated with mainstream psychological science (see Madill
et al., 2000).
KEY FEATURES OF NARRATIVE ANALYSIS
The method of narrative analysis we outline here is primarily
concerned with a holistic, interpretive approach that focuses
on form and content (see Lieblich et al., 1998). Narrative
analysis is an inductive method that contextualizes
understandings in relation to the narrative as a whole, to
its constituent parts, and to the social location(s) of the
participants. Here, we highlight six key features of
narrative analysis.

Research Question(s) and Design Are Concerned With Meaning

Making
A good research question for narrative analysis foregrounds
the experience of a phenomenon in a social world. Such
questions are typically “how” questions about individual or
collective experience rather than questions of event
causality common in experimental research or questions of
relationship among variables common in correlational
research.
Narrative researchers begin with a conceptual question
(“Big Q”) that provides the framework for the research, and
they construct questions about experience (“little q”) that
can be a launching point for interviews (Josselson, 2013).
The conceptual question derives from the scholarly literature
and contributes to the knowledge in that field. The little q
directs the participant to the aspect(s) of their lives that
the researcher wishes to learn about and invites the
participants to describe in detail—tell the story of—either
particular events or a significant aspect or time of life
(e.g., a turning point) or to narrate an entire life story.
We offer more specificity about these questions and their
links to design and data collection in Chapters 2 and 3.
Because meaning making is a universal and constant
psychological process, the breadth of research questions that
can be addressed through narrative analysis is considerable.
But the type of questions is more specific: They are
questions about experience. They are often questions that are
much broader than those typically constructed for either
experimental or correlational research designs in psychology.
A Big Q might be “How do men who are parents in partnered
relationships manage the work–life balance?” or “How are
young people using new vocabulary to describe their gender
and sexual identities?” These kinds of questions are broad
and require the collection of narrative data in which
individuals can say something about how they are managing the
work–life balance or what language they are using to
describe their gender or sexual identities and why. The
equivalent little q for each of these might be “Tell me
about a typical day in your life” and “Tell me your current
gender and sexual identity labels and how you came to use
them.”

Collection of Rich, Narrative Data

While it may seem obvious to highlight the detailed,
contextualized data necessary for narrative analysis, many
researchers trained in positivist or postpositivist
approaches to qualitative analysis often collect brief
written narrative accounts. The best example of this practice
occurs when researchers administer surveys and then provide
respondents with open-response areas to elaborate on or
respond to specific questions. The data collected in these
types of research projects are not to be confused with the
kind of rich, long-form narrative data used in narrative
analysis as we outline it here.
One major presupposition of narrative research is that
humans experience their lives in forms resembling stories.
Therefore, the aim of narrative inquiry is to acquire such
stories in detail with as little direction from the
researcher as possible. The researcher hopes to reach the
participantsʼ construction of and understanding of their
experience in their own terms. The focus of research is on
what the individuals think they are doing and why they think
they are doing so. Behavior, then, is always understood in
the individualʼs context, however that individual may
construct it. The researcher intends to analyze the
narratives for personal meanings and cultural meanings and
the interaction between these; therefore, the researcher
tries to invite the narratives and not to contribute to their
structure or framing. We discuss the role of researcher
position and reflexive practices throughout the book.
Researchers who use narrative analysis typically collect
many pages of textual material, often in the form of
interview transcripts. The narrative interview may range in
its structure, but given our reliance on a contextualist,
interpretive epistemology (Madill et al., 2000), narrative
researchers do not seek to collect a uniform set of data
across participants. In other words, there may be
considerable variability across narrative data from
participants in content and length, but the point of
commonality is that the narratives are sufficiently complete
to allow for a rigorous hermeneutic analysis that answers the
Big Q.
A Holistic, Person-Centered Approach That Emphasizes
Particularity and Diversity Is Employed
Narrative researchers focus their analytic lens on the whole
person and only aggregate across individuals after they have
thoroughly analyzed individual narratives (if aggregation is
even necessary or appropriate to address the Big Q). In this
way, narrative analysis is allied with approaches in
psychology commonly known as “idiographic” or person
centered in contrast to “nomothetic” or variable centered
(Barlow & Nock, 2009; Hammack & Toolis, 2019; Schiff, 2017).
In this holistic, idiographic approach to narrative
analysis, we promote a vision of psychology concerned with
particularity and diversity in human experience (see Allport,
1962; Bhatia, 2018; Hammack, 2008; Schiff, 2017), in contrast
to visions of psychology that emphasize universality and
lawful regularity. Narrative research is not intended to be
generalizable to populations but rather highlights the
particularities and processes of experience. Rather than to
generalize about an experience, the goal of narrative
analysis is to provide “thick description” of a phenomenon
(see Ponterotto, 2006). In that sense, narrative analysts
serve more as documentarians of social life (as in a more
constructionist epistemology) than scientists pursuing
universal truths (as in a more postpositivist epistemology).
Many narrative researchers, however, endeavor to place the
individual narratives they present in a broader frame,
comparing and contrasting their conclusions with the work of
others with related concerns. In that sense, narrative
analysts are more interested in contributing to theory
development than to an accumulated body of knowledge intended
to generalize to a population. All people are like all other
people, like some other people—and also unique (Kluckhohn &
Murray, 1967). Readers of narrative research are explicitly
invited to apply understanding of patterns and processes to
other contexts that are meaningful to them.

Interpretation, Induction, and Discovery Are Centered Over

Deduction and Confirmation
Narrative analysis is an inductive approach in which the
researcher or research team tries to discover something novel
or insightful about psychological life and the meaning-making
process, rather than using the data to confirm the
researcherʼs preconceived notions (as would occur in
traditional hypothesis testing). It is a process of piecing
together data, making the invisible apparent, deciding what
is significant and insignificant, and linking seemingly
unrelated facets of experience.
Narrative analysis involves multiple readings of texts
(e.g., interviews) in which the analyst identifies units of
meaning related to the conceptual question. Texts are read
multiple times in what Schleiermacher (1838/1998) termed a
hermeneutic circle—a recursive process in which the whole
illuminates the parts, which in turn offer a fuller and more
complex picture of the whole, which then leads to a better
understanding of the parts. For example, multiple readings of
Louʼs narrative reveal how his substance abuse is linked to
internalized stigma related to his parentsʼ response to his
gender nonconformity. The meaning of “getting high” for Lou
cannot be extracted from a single reading of a part of his
narrative. It relies on engagement with multiple parts of his
narrative and a holistic view of his life story, including a
consideration of the cultural and historical context of his
gender presentation (see Chapter 3).
 Narrative research is interpretive. Narrative researchers
go beyond description of the text to analyze latent meanings
conveyed by the structure of the discourse or the nature of
the language (Josselson, 2004). This data analysis process
may also involve paying attention to the sequence and the
shifts in style in which the narrator told the story as well
as to silences and gaps in the narrative.
The interpretive nature of narrative analysis calls for a
stance or framework from which the analyst derives meaning in
the text. Such stances have historically included social
constructionism (e.g., K. J. Gergen, 1999), cultural
psychology (e.g., Shweder, 1990), feminist theory (e.g.,
Harding, 2004), symbolic interactionism (e.g., Blumer, 1969),
psychoanalysis (e.g., Hollway & Jefferson, 2000), life story
theory (e.g., McAdams, 2001), identity theory (e.g., Erikson,
1968), and intersectionality theory (e.g., Crenshaw, 1991).
But new systems of meaning are always emerging for scholars,
and narrative analysts do not need to use any particular
interpretive stance beyond foundational epistemological
commitments. The point is for analysts to be transparent and
reflexive about the interpretive stances they apply to the
text and consider how commitments to one stance may
facilitate or inhibit the analytic process. As we discuss
later in the book, such reflexive practices are essential to
ensure the methodological integrity of narrative analysis
(Levitt et al., 2017).
Narrative researchers orient themselves to understanding
subjectivity and human complexity, especially in those cases
where the many variables that contribute to human life cannot
be controlled. Narrative researchers aim to take into account
—and interpretively account for—the multiple perspectives
of both the researched and researcher. People create
narratives for the circumstance in which the story will be
told. That is, the narrative provided is always bound to the
context of its telling (Mishler, 1986). Issues of power and
social distinction between narrator and researcher will be
reflected in the narrative that is created. Narratives are
also created with reference to dominant cultural narratives,
either embodying or contesting them (see Hammack & Toolis,
2015).
No two interviewers will obtain exactly the same story
from an individual interviewee. Therefore, narrative
researchers are more concerned with a thoroughly reflexive
analysis of the parameters and influences on the interview
situation than with reliability (see Madill et al., 2000),
which assumes an underlying truth on which multiple
interpreters will (ideally) converge. Narrative researchers,
like other qualitative researchers who are anchored in
constructionist epistemology, assume diverse perspectives on
interpretation and do not expect interpretive convergence.
Hence, a concern with reliability common in positivist or
postpositivist research is replaced with a concern with
reflexivity in which the interpreter is intentional and
transparent in their position vis-à-vis the research question
(Madill et al., 2000). We discuss this at greater length and
illustrate reflexive practices in narrative analysis in
Chapter 3.
Meanings, though, are neither singular nor static. Life
narratives represent a self that is alive and evolving, a
self that can shift meanings, rather than a fixed entity. The
same life story in terms of content may have different
meanings to a person at different times of life (Josselson,
2009). Similarly, different readers (i.e., narrative
analysts) will locate different meanings in a text—which is
why the context of the interpreter is so important.
Analysis of Implicit and Explicit Meaning Is Blended
Narrative analysts consider both the explicit and implicit
meaning in texts. The explicit meaning is identified through
a “hermeneutics of restoration” or “faith” and conveys
what the narrative intends to express on the surface of the
text (Josselson, 2004). Applying a hermeneutics of faith, the
analyst attempts to recover and summarize the meaning clearly
intended within a text. We illustrate this analytic practice
in detail in Chapter 3.
The implicit meaning is identified through a
“hermeneutics of demystification” or “suspicion” and
derives from an effort to decode meanings hidden beneath the
surface of the text (Josselson, 2004). Some narrative
researchers position themselves to “decode” narratives,
reading what may be unconscious, unspoken, or unrecognized by
the participants themselves (Chase, 1996; Clarke & Hoggett,
2019; Hollway & Jefferson, 2000; Josselson, 2004; Saville
Young & Frosh, 2016). Applying a hermeneutics of decoding,
the analyst attempts to uncover the subtext and the
motivations behind particular narrative constructions. (We
illustrate this analytic practice in detail in Chapter 3.)
The decision to read beneath the text for latent meanings
depends on the research question.
One might, for example, do one reading for the
participantʼs explicit meanings and then another reading for
implicit ones. A “decoding” reading, searching for implicit
meanings, involves some conceptual question and its likely
markers in the narrative. For example, in a study of identity
formation over the life course, I (RJ) was interested in
processes of separation and individuation (Josselson, 2017)
as they affect identity. In one interview, Freda, a woman at
midlife, was reviewing her life and talking about the
struggles she had with her daughter, a story that dominated
her recounting of her recent life experiences. She said,
“Itʼs the personal stuff that knocks you down a peg—because
itʼs not what you anticipate when you go into marriage. Itʼs
nothing I experienced growing up.” Note that in this
passage, Freda explicitly said that she had been “knocked
down” by this difficulty. But she also shifted pronouns to
“you” and declared that the pain was because the experience
with her daughter had been different from her experience
growing up.
A hermeneutics of decoding reading would involve (a)
looking for the other places in the transcript where Freda
shifted pronouns in this way, marking a step away from a
separate and individuated “I” voice, and (b) noting where
she similarly brought in her experience growing up as a way
of trying to understand her daughter. Such a reading invokes
questions about her need to generalize her experience and her
need to live out the expectations from her childhood. These
questions are in the context of tracking Fredaʼs internal
structures of individuation as part of the process of her
identity formation. Explicitly she is saying that life has
not turned out as she expected. Our research question may be
about what the dynamics of this expectation may mean in terms
of her development. We can try to understand how her
expectations have clashed with her actual life experiences
and how these relate to her inner experience of herself as a
person separate from her family of origin.
Another woman, Linda, in the same study said, “If Godʼs
plan is for me to be a nurse in Maine, and I canʼt believe
that it wouldnʼt be because thatʼs been his plan for me since
I was 12, then thatʼs, then I . . . uh . . . Iʼll get
through it somehow.” On the surface, Linda is saying that
she will rely on her faith to get through the next life
challenge. We note, however, the broken speech, which may
indicate internal conflict, and we might also read the rest
of the interview for the decisions she feels she has authored
and the ones she attributes to “Godʼs plan.” This
distinction might inform us about when and how she takes
responsibility for her life choices. We might also note the
personal nature of her experience of God, whom she feels
makes highly specific plans for her, and try to understand
how this unfolds in the context of her development.
Demystification readings might also render implicit
sociocultural meanings and highlight what is taken for
granted as foundational in the world of the participant, even
though these assumptions are not directly stated. For
example, a Chinese woman spoke of beating her daughter as a
form of discipline in a tone that suggested that she regarded
this as normative in her culture (Josselson, 2020).

Attend to Coconstruction of Meaning

Narrative analysts pay close attention to how meaning is
coconstructed, both between interviewer and interviewee in a
narrative interview (e.g., Mishler, 1986) and between the
individual and the possibilities afforded by culture (e.g.,
Hammack & Toolis, 2019) as decisions are made about what
cultural narratives are appropriated into the personal
narrative. This feature of narrative analysis is particularly
distinct from other forms of qualitative inquiry because it
requires the analyst to attend to multiple levels of analysis
and results in a context-sensitive interpretation of data.
This aligns narrative analysis with cultural psychology, a
central tenet of which is the idea that persons and cultures
are mutually constituted—that they “make each other up”
(e.g., Markus & Kitayama, 2010; Shweder, 1990).
 Narratives, however, are not objectified or reified in
narrative research. The narrative researcher recognizes that
narration always occurs in a context of telling (or writing),
a context which bounds and influences what is told—and how
it is told. Narrative researchers regard findings as relative
to their standpoint as an observer.
Sandra Harding (2004) asserted that the beliefs and
behaviors of the researcher are also empirical evidence that
must be open to critical scrutiny. What are the shared social
locations and assumptions? Where are the points of
discordance or strangeness? What does it mean to interpret
experiences of people from quite different racial, ethnic, or
cultural backgrounds? Frequently, writers will argue that
having personal familiarity with the experiences in question
gives them a privileged position for interpreting such
experiences. But issues of overidentification with
participants under study may become problematic, and
researchers then have to be scrupulous that the meanings they
“discover” in their interview material are indeed
“faithful” to the meanings of their participants and that
they have not simply substituted their own. Methodological
integrity depends on a reflexive process in which analysts
carefully consider and document how their position influences
every step of the research (e.g., Levitt et al., 2018).
SUMMARY
In this introductory chapter, we reviewed the history,
epistemology, and key features of narrative analysis.
Especially novel to narrative analysis is the attention to
both explicit and implicit meanings in a text. We introduced
the joint hermeneutic approaches of restoration and
demystification, to which we will return often in the book,
especially with our example of a narrative analysis in
Chapter 3.
Narrative analysis is holistic in the sense that meanings
are analyzed within each case. The narrative researcher
attends to the layerings and intersections of meanings for
the individual and only later looks across cases for repeated
patterns and tries to explain similarities and differences in
patternings of meanings across individuals.
2
STUDY DESIGN AND DATA
COLLECTION

In this chapter, we outline the process of a research project

that uses narrative analysis. We begin by discussing the
types of research questions narrative analysis can address,
and we then discuss the arc of the project as a “recursive”
circle in which recruitment, interviewing, and analysis all
occur in tandem and inform one another. We reserve the
demonstration of the complete analysis of an interview text
for Chapter 3.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
We begin a narrative research project with a conceptual
question (“Big Q”) that is best explored through a
holistic, idiographic approach. As indicated in Chapter 1,
this question is generally phrased as a “how” question
because the focus is on processes and experience. With its
grounding in interpretive epistemology, narrative analysts
address questions of meaning and experience in context. This
conceptual question is then translated to an experience-near
“little q” question that can be used to invite narration of
experiences that bear on the research question.
The Big Q is the conceptual question that underlies the
research, and it is often expressed in terms comprehensible
to the researcher and larger community of researchers. In
contrast to the Big Q, the little q as a question is
“experience near” and fully accessible to the participant
in a narrative research project. It is readily understood and
invites participants to narrate their experience of some
phenomenon rather than to provide some abstract or
intellectual viewpoint on a topic. The importance of the
little q cannot be overstated and involves a great deal of
thought. The little q can often become the introduction to
the interview.
The following are some conceptual and experiential
questions in narrative research projects.
BIG Q: How do people diagnosed with bipolar disorder manage
how this disorder is socially constructed (i.e., the
societal discourse about bipolar disorder)?
[Conceptual framework: social construction of
psychopathology]
LITTLE Q: I want to learn about what happens to people when
they are first given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder
and what then happens over time. Could you please
start by telling me when you were first diagnosed
with bipolar disorder, how you thought about this
diagnosis, and how your experience of thinking about
this disorder has changed over time?
BIG Q: How do young people who have lost a parent maintain
a continuing bond with their dead parent?
[Conceptual framework: the dynamics of grief]
LITTLE Q: I am studying people who have lost a parent before
they were 18 to understand the impact of this
experience on their lives. Can you please tell me
about your experience with this, starting from the
circumstances of the death of your parent and how
and when you have thought about them over time?

Narrative research questions tend to focus on processes—

individual, developmental, and sociocultural—that reflect
how experience is constructed both internally and externally.
They tend to be questions that address the structure of
subjective experience, and it is the participantʼs meaning
making in relation to our questions that the narrative
interview explores. As we discuss later, a narrative research
interview is not a series of questions like a survey, and it
may or may not have a formal protocol.
RECRUITING, INTERVIEWING, ANALYZING: THE RECURSIVE CIRCLE
A research project that uses narrative analysis can be
conducted by a single researcher or a larger research team. A
thorough grounding in the existing literature on the
conceptual question is recommended and will greatly aid the
interpretation of the data at every stage of analysis.
However, the iterative nature of narrative analysis allows
for a fluid and responsive engagement with literature as data
are collected and analyzed.
While some narrative research uses personal documents or
public texts such as political speeches (e.g., Cohler, 2007;
Pilecki & Hammack, 2015), we focus on interviews as a source
of data for a narrative research project. Interview-based
designs, the most widespread form of narrative research, can
be outlined simply: Participants who fit into the subgroup of
interest are invited to be interviewed at length (generally 1
to 4 hours, in a single or multiple sittings). Interviews are
recorded and then transcribed and analyzed.

Defining and Recruiting a Sample

Once the conceptual and experiential questions are created,
the next step is to recruit participants who have experiences
that might illuminate the research question(s). Because the
aim of narrative research is not to generalize to a
population but rather to examine meaning-making processes for
individuals and group members, random or probability sampling
is not necessary. The primary criterion for sample selection
is relation to the conceptual question. For example, if the
conceptual question concerns bipolar disorder, individuals
diagnosed with bipolar disorder are the target for sampling.
 A secondary criterion for sampling might be diversity
within a broader category. For example, in a study of bipolar
people, we will likely want to sample for diversity in such
factors as gender and race or ethnicity. Sometimes
understanding a phenomenon within a particular group is the
focus of the research question, and the narrative researcher
then has to think about what diversity might mean in this
context—and whether diversity is even desirable. For
example, if one were to be studying acculturation among Asian
immigrants to the United States, the researcher might decide
to focus on a specific country or time. Narrative researchers
have to think about diversity but not necessarily investigate
all aspects of it in a single study. Depth is often more
valuable than breadth.
Deciding on criteria for recruitment can be complex in
some instances. For example, a graduate student who wanted to
study the construction of motherhood among Native American
women who grew up in urban areas planned to interview women
who were on the cusp of defining themselves as mothers. She
wanted to include women pregnant for the first time and women
in their first year of motherhood. A debate ensued about
whether she could mix sampling these women in the same study.
Would it be better to study one group or the other? Is there
any a priori way to determine whether the construction of
motherhood may be different before and after giving birth?
And should women who conceived through in vitro fertilization
be excluded? What of occupation or social class? These
questions might be resolved once the study is underway and
the researcher understands better which contextual issues may
be important. Whatever decisions are made set boundaries
around the findings, leaving some questions open for further
studies.
 The narrative researcher tries to construct the group of
interest in a way that addresses the question without being
too broad or too narrow about who might serve as helpful
informants. Including people who are too different from one
another may preclude finding common themes to analyze. Making
the category of interest too narrow, however, may make it
difficult to find participants and render findings overly
specific to a very small group. Recruitment can always be
adjusted as the study proceeds. For example, the researcher
studying the construction of motherhood in Native American
women found that women who had already given birth seemed
much more aware of conflicting cultural pressures than women
who were not yet mothers, and she decided to recruit more
from those who were already mothers.
Increasingly, researchers are making use of the internet
and social media to find people to interview, and access to
the community or group of potential participants might occur
through personal networks. Sometimes, participants can
suggest other people who might fit the criteria the
researcher has defined, in an approach known as
“snowballing.” How participants have been recruited is, of
course, an important consideration in contextualizing the
motives people may have for telling their stories. If one
were interested in understanding the stigma experiences of
LGBTQ people and only recruited at Pride events, one is
probably likely to hear more stories of resilience than if
one recruited only at mental health clinics.
Recruitment needs to be reasonably transparent about the
aims of the research because this is the inception of the
research relationship (Josselson, 2013). The researcher must
explain what they want to understand and why and must do so
in as inviting a way as possible. Stilted or overly formal
ways of recruiting participants are seldom successful. The
researcher has to communicate a genuine interest in a
potential participantʼs experience and an eagerness to listen
to and learn from their stories, as well as provide a
guarantee of confidentiality and anonymity.
The question of how many participants are necessary is a
complex one. The offhand answer is you need enough people to
have something interesting to say about your question. Too
few participants will lead to thin interpretations (although
some single case studies analyzed in great depth can also be
valuable). Too many may become overwhelming to the
researcher.
One popular criterion to determine the appropriate sample
size in qualitative research issaturation. Saturation occurs
when new data are producing no significant new patterns or
insights (e.g., Fusch & Ness, 2015; Guest et al., 2006). The
researcher has achieved sufficient perspective to explore the
research question, and there is little to be gained by
collecting new data. At this point, one may cease recruitment
for new participants.
In conducting a narrative study, cases are analyzed as
they are obtained so that what is learned from one
participant can make the researcher more sensitive to
listening to the next participant. We may follow a hunch and
try to find similar or different participants to augment our
understandings as they are developing. Narrative analysis is
a recursive process. It is better to analyze as one proceeds
rather than collect data all at once and analyze later. This
also helps researchers know when their analysis is
“saturated.” One cannot know at the outset how many
participants will lead to this experience.

Conducting the Interview

Interviews should be arranged at a time and place convenient
for the participant. While in-person interviews in a quiet,
private setting are the ideal, communication technologies
such as video meetings now make it easier to conduct
interviews less constrained by geographic proximity.
Attention to how the interview setting might influence the
content and structure of the narration itself is a critical
part of the analysis phase. For example, an interviewer
situated behind a desk in an office building will be
signaling a wish for more formal, public responses than one
who positions both interviewer and interviewee in comfortable
chairs near one another, perhaps in a home. If interviews
take place in a participantʼs home, the researcher must take
care that they have a private space where the interview
cannot be overheard—even if the interviewee avers that “I
have nothing to hide from my family.”
Interviews for narrative research involve forming a
relationship that brings the interviewee into contact with
the research question (via the little q question) and then
empathically follows the narration with prompts that invite
further disclosure (Josselson, 2013). The narrative
researcher holds the research question as a framework rather
than tightly structuring the interview. If we bring the
interviewees in contact with the experiential (little q)
question, the interview will flow along the channels with
which the interviewees structure their experience.
As the interview proceeds, the interviewer will attempt to
invite stories rather than generalizations. “Can you tell me
about a time when . . .” becomes a useful prompt and
“tell me more” a useful follow-up for elaboration. The
interview will reveal, in its structure and the ways in which
stories are linked to one another, how aspects of experience
are related in the intervieweeʼs mind. An interview properly
conducted will elicit stories around a theme in the context
of the relationship between interviewer and interviewee. For
example, Louʼs interview was guided by the little q to tell
the interviewer his life story. Using prompts to elaborate
and to especially highlight high points, low points, and
turning points in his narrative, the interview yielded rich
information about Louʼs sexual identity development in the
historical context of the AIDS epidemic (see Chapter 3).
While the interview is sufficiently unstructured so as to
allow the participants to decide how to tell their stories,
the researcher also creates “pocket questions”—questions
to be raised if they are not covered in the initial
narration. These additional questions can change over the
course of the study as the researcher learns more about the
phenomena of interest. For example, in a study of how the
loss of a first important love relationship affects late
adolescent development, the researcher found that none of his
first five interviewees mentioned sexuality. He was puzzled
by this, and when his sixth interviewee also omitted
consideration of sexuality, he decided to ask about its place
in the meaning of the relationship—and did so for the
remaining interviews (Beinart, 2009). In the analysis phase,
it is important to keep track of the fact that it was the
interviewer who raised this question. And the interviewer is
also free to ask the interviewee what led them to omit this
topic from their story.
Because the underlying epistemology of narrative analysis
is constructionist rather than realist, there is no concern
for differences across the data set in what was collected or
such issues as “interviewer bias.” Narrative analysis does
not conceive of some underlying universal experience or truth
across the data, in which case procedural variability may
introduce “contamination.” Rather, narrative analysts seek
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
them. In order both to ascertain such suspicion, and
discover so dangerous a person, all the Nuns were
ordered into one room, and there made to strip
themselves stark naked; when the Abbess, with her
spectacles on her nose (whence the Tale has received
its name) inspected them all, one after another,
carefully. To relate how the young Man,
notwithstanding the ingenious precautions he had
taken, came to be found out, and how the Abbess’s
spectacles were thrown from her nose and broken, is
foreign to our subject: let it here suffice to say that the
young Man was really found out; and that the Nuns,
except those who had been concerned with him, who
were previously locked up in a safe place,—that the
Nuns, I say, laid hold of him, led him into a wood that
stood close to their Convent, and there tied him to a
tree, naked as he was, in order to make him atone for
his audaciousness by a smart flagellation. Having
forgotten to supply themselves with the necessary
instruments of correction, they ran back to the Convent
to fetch them, and whether from the mislaying of a key,
or some other accident, were detained a little time. In
the mean time a Miller, riding upon his Ass, went
through the wood; and seeing the young Man in the
abovementioned plight, stopped, and asked him the
reason of it: to which the latter made answer, that it
was those wicked Nuns who had put him in that
situation, because he would not gratify their wanton
requests; that he had rather die than be guilty of such
thing. The Miller then cast upon him a look of the
utmost contempt ... but it will be better to refer the
Reader to the abovementioned Author himself, for the
inimitable Dialogue that passed between the young
Man and the Miller: here it will be enough to say, that
this latter proposed to the other to put himself in his
place, and warranted him he would behave in quite a
different manner, and much more to the satisfaction of
the Nuns than he had done. The young Man had no
need of much encouragement to accept the proposal:
after the Miller had released him, and stripped himself,
he tied him fast to the same tree, and had just time
enough to steal away, and hide himself behind some
neighbouring bush, when the Nuns rushed again out of
the same door at which they had got in, armed with all
the disciplines and besoms they had been able to find
in the Convent. They immediately marched up to the
person who was tied to the tree, and without minding
the broad shoulders and brawny limbs which were now
offered to their view, began to use their disciplines with
great agility. In vain did the Miller expostulate with
them on their using him so ill: in vain did he
remonstrate that he was not the Man whom they took
him to be; that he was not that beardless stripling, that
milk-sop simpleton, with whom they had formerly had
to do, that woman-hater who had given them so just a
cause of dissatisfaction; that they ought to try him
before they entertained so bad an opinion of him:—in
vain did he even at last, in the extremity of pain, apply
to the utmost powers of his native language, to convey
to them the clearest ideas he could, both to those
wishes he supposed in them, and of his great abilities
to gratify them: the more loudly and clearly he spoke,
the more unmercifully they laid on, and only left him
when they had worn out their disciplines.
Cervantes likewise, whose authority is equal to that
of any Author, and who has moreover thrown a great
light upon the subject of flagellations, has introduced a
fact which greatly serves to confirm the observations
we are discussing here. I mean to speak of what
happened in that memorable night in which the Senora
Rodriguez paid a visit to the valorous Don Quixote, in
his bed. That Gentlewoman having, in the course of
the conversation she had with the Knight, dropped
several reflections of a very bad kind on the Duchess
and the fair Altisidora, who were at that very instant
listening at the door, these two Ladies, though justly
and greatly offended at the liberty that was thus taken
with their character, recurred to no expedient of a
coarse and rough kind to avenge the insult; but they
immediately applied to the summary, yet smart,—
genteel, yet effectual, mode of correction here alluded
to, namely, a flagellation. And here the Author we
mention has taken an opportunity of giving a singular
instance of the readiness of wit of the fair Sex, and of
the quickness with which they usually extricate
themselves out of the seemingly most perplexing
difficulties. The Duchess and Altisidora were entirely
destitute of the necessary instruments to inflict the
chastisement they had resolved upon; but they had the
great presence of mind to think of using their slippers
for that purpose: they presently pulled them off their
feet; bounced the door open; ran to the Senora
Rodriguez; in the twinkling of an eye made her ready
for flagellation, and immediately began to exert their
new weapons with great dexterity. Thence, still in the
dark, they passed to the astonished Knight, who lay
snug in his bed, and who, by his listening to the stories
of the Senora, and also by his questions, had
encouraged her to proceed in her reflections (a thing
which he might full as well have avoided doing) and
bestowed upon him a few of those favours they had so
plentifully heaped upon the above Gentlewoman.
At this place might also be mentioned, as being
extremely well in point to the subject we are treating,
the kind of satisfaction required by Dulcinea, from
Sancho, and that which the Lady introduced by Butler,
prescribed to the renowned Hudibras, while he was in
the stocks; though, I confess, it might be said that the
corrections here alluded to, were only advised, not
inflicted, by the above Ladies. But it will suffice to
mention, as a conclusion of these quotations from
great Authors, the manner in which Lazarillo de
Tormes, the notorious Spanish Cheat, was served by
his four Wives. Having found out the place of his
abode, they immediately agreed among themselves to
serve him with the elegant kind of chastisement here
mentioned; and having all together surprized him one
morning, while he was asleep, they tied him fast to his
bed, and served upon him one of the most dreadful
flagellations that ever were inflicted, since the use of
them has been contrived, as we are told in the History
of the Life of the said Lazarillo; a Book which is still in
repute in Spain, it being written with humour, and
containing true pictures of the manners of that Country,
and being even, as some say, founded on real facts.
Nor are true and well-authenticated instances
wanting, to confirm the same observations. None,
however, can be mentioned, that sets in a stronger
light the love of justice inherent in the female Sex, and
their constant attention to make choice of expedients
of an elegant kind to express their resentment, than
the custom that prevails in France and Italy, and
perhaps in other Countries, according to which, Ladies
use to flagellate their acquaintances, while they are yet
in bed, on the morning of the day of the festival of the
Innocents; whence this flagellatory custom is called
“giving the Innocents” (dar gli Innocenti): the word
Innocent, we may observe, has, in both the Italian and
French languages, besides the English signification of
it, that of fool, or simpleton; hence the words, the Day
of the Innocents, seem also to signify in those two
languages, the Fools day, or the day of the Unwary.
Nay, so well established is the custom we mention,
that Women, in those parts, look upon that day, as a
day of general justice and retribution, or an Assize or
Sessions day, to which they refer taking satisfaction for
the slight offences they may receive in the course of
the year, especially from their male friends. They even
will sometimes, when the latter hesitate too much in
granting their requests, or misbehave in any manner,
hint to them the fatal consequences that may ensue
from such a conduct, and plainly intimate to them, that
a certain day in the year is to come on which every
thing is to be atoned for.
When this important day is arrived, those Ladies
who have agreed to join together in the same party, or
(to continue the comparison drawn from the law that
has been above employed) who have agreed to go
together upon the circuit, repair early in the morning to
the appointed place of rendezvous, for instance the
apartment of one of them, sufficiently provided with
disciplines from their respective kitchens; and after
laying the plan of their operations, they sally out, to
take a round to the apartments of their different
acquaintances.
The prudent and cautious, on such an important day,
take great care to secure well the bolts and locks of
their doors; or rather, fearing that sleep should
overcome them, and knowing how fatal neglect might
prove, they take that precaution on the evening before,
when going to bed, and as an additional security, they
heap all the chairs and tables against the door. Others,
who are of a bold and daring spirit, on the contrary
affect on that day, to leave the doors of their rooms
wide open, and stay in bed, resolved to wait the event,
and undauntedly to face the storm. However, as such
an affectation of bravery seems to indicate that some
present trick, or at least some future retaliation of
some kind or other is intended, the Ladies commonly
keep clear from a place they judge so ominous; unless
there happens to be one among them of an
uncommonly courageous turn of mind, who places
herself in the van, encourages the whole party; and
they all together rush into the room and fall upon the
adventurous Hero, who is then made to pay dearly for
his temerity. When this does not happen to be the
case, and at the same time they find the doors of all
those persons whom they had expressly marked out
for chastisement, to be proof against either a coup-de-
main or a regular siege, as they must not part without
some effectual business has been transacted, the
cloud commonly breaks upon some unfortunate
Simpleton, who has left his door open for no other
reason than because he had forgot what day of the
month it was; they lay fast hold of him, and seldom
leave him before their disciplines are worn out to the
stumps. The story is soon circulated in whispers in the
neighbourhood; and if any person who has not yet
heard of it, observes that the Gentleman appears that
day uncommonly grave and sulky, his wonder
presently ceases, when he is told that, on the morning,
they have given him the Innocents.
The custom we mention, seems to be of pretty
ancient date; it is alluded to in that old Book formerly
quoted, The Tales of the Queen of Navarre. A Man, an
Upholsterer by trade, as it is said in one of these Tales
(for Men will sometimes avail themselves of the
practice in question when it may serve their turn) a
Man was in love with his servant Maid; and as he did
not know how to find an opportunity to escape the
vigilance of his Wife, and be alone with her, he
pretended, in a conversation he brought about on the
subject, on the eve of Innocent’s day, to find much fault
with the Maid; complained that she was a lazy Wench,
and so on; and added, that, in order to teach her
better, he proposed, on the next morning, to give her
the Innocents. The Wife greatly applauded his
resolution: at break at day, he accordingly rose from
his bed, took up a discipline of such a monstrous size,
that his Wife’s heart aked to think what correction the
Maid was about to undergo, and ran up stairs with a
disposition of seemingly very great severity: however, I
am happy to inform the Reader, that, after he had
bounced the door open, and at first frighted the Maid
very much, every thing was concluded in an amicable
manner.
If from Ladies of a middling station in life, and in the
class of Upholsterers, we turn our eyes towards Ladies
of rank, and Court Ladies, we shall meet with
instances no less instructive and interesting.
We may, in the first place, mention the case of the
Poet Clopinel, which has been alluded to in a former
Chapter. This Poet, who was also called John of
Mehun (a small Town on the river Loire) lived about the
year 1300, under the reign of Philip the Fair, King of
France, at whose Court he was well received. He
wrote several Books, and among others translated into
French the Letters of Abelard to Heloisa: but that of his
works which gave him most reputation, was his
conclusion of the celebrated Roman de la Rose; a
Poem of much the same turn with Ovid’s Art of Love,
which had been begun by William de Lorris, and met
with prodigious success in those times, and was
afterwards imitated by Chaucer. However, Clopinel
gave great offence to the whole Sex, by four lines he
had inserted in that Poem, the meaning of which is as
follows:—“All of you are, will be, or were, either in
deed, or intention, wh-res; and whoever would well
search into your conduct, wh-res would find you all to
be.”
Toutes êtes, serez, ou futes
De fait ou de volonté, putes;
Et qui bien vous chercheroit
Toutes putes vous trouveroit.
The meaning of these verses, if we take from them
the coarseness of the expressions, which did not
perhaps sound so harsh in those times as they would
in our days, did not at bottom differ from the well-
known line of Pope,
“—Every Woman is at heart a Rake.”

Yet we do not hear that this Poet suffered any

flagellation on that account, from the Court Ladies, or
any other Ladies; whether it was that he prudently took
care, after writing the above line, to keep for some time
out of the way, or that the Ladies felt no resentment at
the accusation. With respect to Clopinel, however, the
case proved otherwise: and whether his expressions
really had, notwithstanding what has been above
suggested, much the same coarse meaning as now, or
Ladies had, in those days, a nicer sensibility to any
thing that might touch their honour, the Ladies at Court
were much offended at the harsh charge that was thus
brought against the whole Sex without distinction: they
resolved to make the insolent Poet properly feel the
effects of their resentment: and as they were at the
same time firmly determined, especially being Court
Ladies, not to use any expedient but of an elegant and
refined kind, they resolved upon a flagellation. One
day, accordingly, as Clopinel was coming to Court,
entirely ignorant of the fate that awaited him, the
Ladies, who had previously supplied themselves with
proper instruments, laid hold of him, and immediately
proceeded to make him ready for correction. No
possible assistance could rescue Clopinel from having
that chastisement served upon him which he so justly
deserved, except his wit; which happily did not fail him
in so imminent a danger, and suggested to him to ask
leave to speak a few words. The favour was granted
him, with express injunction, however, to make his
story short: when, after acknowledging the justice of
the sentence that had been passed upon him, he
requested it, as an act of mercy, that that Lady who
thought herself most affronted by his lines, should give
the first blow: this request struck the Ladies with so
much surprise (owing no doubt to the fear every one of
them immediately conceived, of giving an advantage
against herself for which she might afterwards repent)
that, to use the expression of the Author of Moreri’s
Dictionary, from which this fact is extracted, the rods
fell from their hands, and Clopinel escaped
unpunished.
Court Ladies of more modern times, have given
similar instances of refinement and elegance in their
method of revenging the affronts they had received.
On this occasion the Reader may be reminded of the
case of the Marchioness of Tresnel, which has been
related at length in a former place. Another instance of
the justice of Ladies, still more interesting by far,
occurred at the Court of Russia about the year 1740.
The object of the Ladies resentment, was a Fop of
quality, lately returned from his Travels; nor will the
Reader question the propriety of the flagellation that
was served upon him, when he shall be informed that
this presumptuous Spark had been guilty of no less an
offence than having publicly boasted of having
received favours which had never been shewn him.
The fact is related in a Book intitled, Letters from
Russia, which was published by a Lady whose
husband resided at that Court in a public capacity,
between the years 1730 and 1740: the book is written
in a pleasing style, and contains a deal of interesting
information concerning the Russian Court at that time.
The Author, it is said, lived a few years ago at Windsor:
her Letters from Russia were addressed to a female
friend in England.
In the eleventh letter, the following account is
contained. ‘I long to tell you a story; but your prudery (I
beg pardon, your prudence) frightens me: however, I
cannot resist; so pop your fan before your face, for I
am going to begin. We have here a young fellow of
fashion, who has made the tour of France, &c. &c. At
his return he fell in company with three or four pretty
Women at a friend’s house, where he sung, danced,
laughed, was very free with the Ladies, and behaved
quite a-la-mode de Paris. As he had given the gazing
audience a specimen of his airs, so he did not fail
afterwards to brag of the fondness of the Ladies for
him, and of the proofs they had given him of it. This he
repeated in all companies, till it reached the ears of the
husbands, who looked glum in silence; and at last, in
plain terms, expressed the cause of their ill-humour.’
To abridge the account, it will suffice to say that the
Ladies resolved to punish the vain-boasting fop as he
deserved: a letter was written to him by one of them,
appointing a place where she was to meet him: “he
flew on the wings of love to the rendezvous,”
perfumed, we are to suppose, and in his smartest
dress. Though he expected to meet only one of the
Ladies, he found them all four waiting for him; and
instead of that delightful afternoon he had prepared
himself to spend, he was entertained with a most
serious flagellation. ‘Some say (continues the Author
who relates this fact) that the Ladies actually whipped
him; others, they ordered their maids to do it: that the
punishment was inflicted with so much rigour as to
oblige him to keep his bed some time, is certain; but
whether the Ladies were executioners or spectators
only, is a doubt.’
For my own part, I shall be bolder than the fair
Author who gives this account; and I will take upon
myself to decide that the Ladies were spectators only.
Had this young fellow of fashion we are speaking of,
committed an offence of no very grievous kind; had he,
for instance, been guilty of some word, or even action,
moderately indecent in the presence of the Ladies, or
affronted them by some ill-timed jokes, or had he, like
Clopinel, indulged himself in a bon-mot, or even a
whole song, against the honour of the Sex, then we
might suppose the Ladies arms, to have possessed
sufficient vigour to have served him with a correction
proportioned to the degree of his guilt. Not that I
consider, however, as some Readers will perhaps do,
the falsehood of the facts he had boasted of, as being
any aggravation of his offence: very far from it: it is
when such facts are true, that the boasting of them is
really a fault of a black nature: it is such, in my humble
opinion, that no possible flagellation can atone for it;
the ungrateful Tell-tale ought to be stitched in a bag,
and thrown into the river. However, as the vain
speeches of the young fellow were in themselves
highly wicked, we are to suppose that the Ladies
trusted the care of chastising him to more robustious
hands than their own; and we must side with that part
of the Public, who thought that they ordered their
Maids to perform for them; that is to say, a set of Maid
slaves selected among the stoutest of those who
composed their housholds, Maids imported from the
banks of the Palus-meotis, or the Black Sea, and who
thought it a glorious opportunity for shewing their
mistresses their zeal in serving them. This supposition
agrees extremely well with the ensuing part of the
account, viz. that this vain-boasting Coxcomb was
obliged to keep his bed some time: who knows?
perhaps five or six weeks.
The only personal share, we are to think, the Ladies
took in the affair, was, when the execution was
concluded, to admonish the culprit as to his future
conduct. Milton makes the observation, which is
quoted by the Author of the Spectator, that the Devil
seemed once to be sensible of shame; it was when he
received a censure (unexpected for him, we may
suppose) from a young Angel of remarkable beauty. In
like manner, what must have been the shame of that
young Coxcomb, who perhaps had never blushed in
his life, when he heard himself addressed by the
Ladies who had caused him to be served with so just a
chastisement! what must have been his remorse for
his naughty behaviour! his grief in considering, that,
had he perhaps waited patiently a little time longer,
they would have willingly honoured him with their most
valuable favours! The Lady who possessed the easiest
and most elegant delivery, advanced towards him a
few steps; and, accompanying her short speech with
the action of an arm of an exquisite form and hand as
white as snow, and with a frown on her face, which,
without lessening its beauty, gave a true expression of
her just resentment, she made him sensible, in few
words, of the greatness of his fault, and the justice of
the chastisement that had been administered to him:
then turning towards the Calmouk and Tartarian Maids
who had so well executed her former orders, she
directed them to shew him the way to the street door.
To these instances of the justice of Ladies, we may
add those of the corrections they have bestowed upon
their husbands; as they have an undoubted right. A
very remarkable case of that sort is alluded to, in the I.
Canto P. II. of Hudibras.
Did not a certain Lady whip
Of late her husband’s own Lordship?
And, though a Grandee of the House,
Clawed him with fundamental blows.
Tied him stark-naked to a bed-post,
And firked his hide, as if sh’ had rid post;
And after, in the Sessions Court,
Where whipping’s judged, had honour for’t.
The noble person here mentioned, was Lord
Munson: similar acts of authority on their husbands,
were performed, about the same time, by Sir William
Waller’s Lady, Mrs. May, and Sir Henry Mildmay’s
Lady. From these instances we find, that, amidst the
general wreck of the Monarchical, Aristocratical, and
Clerical, powers in the Nation, and while the King,
Lords, and High Clergy, had their prerogatives wrested
from them and annihilated, Wives knew how to assert
their jurisdiction over their Husbands, and preserve
their just authority. The subject however is too deep to
be discussed at large here: I intend to offer more facts
to the Public in a separate Work, which will be a
compleat Treatise, and a kind of Matrimonial Code in
which the true principles shall be laid concerning the
rights of Wives, and the submission of Husbands[112].
Those Authors who have treated of the manner in
which Men ought to behave in their intercourse with
the fair Sex, have been so sensible that the latter must
unavoidably, at one time or other, have occasion to
bestow lectures and corrections on their Suitors or
Lovers (and also their Husbands) that they have made
it a point to these, to bear those momentary
mortifications with patience and humility, and not to
think that such submission reflects any dishonour upon
them. This is the precept expressly given by Ovid, in
his Art of Love;—‘Do not think it in any degree
shameful for you, to submit to the harsh words, and
the blows, of the young Woman you court.’
Nec maledicta puta, nec verbera ferre puellæ
Turpe——

And indeed we find that those Lovers who have best

understood their business, have not only constantly
followed the advice of Ovid, and chearfully submitted
to receive such corrections as their Mistresses were
pleased to impose upon them; but when they have
happened to have been involuntarily guilty of offences
of a somewhat grievous kind, they have done more;
they have, of themselves, offered freely to submit to
them. Thus Polyenos, in the Satyr of Petronius, who
had been guilty with Circe of one of those faults which
Ladies so difficultly prevail upon themselves to forgive,
who had in short committed that offence which the
abovementioned Miller boasted he never happened to
be guilty of, wrote afterwards to her,—“If you want to
kill me, I will come to you with an iron weapon; or if you
are satisfied with stripes, I run naked to my Mistress.”
(Polyaenos Circæ salutem.... Sive occidere placet,
cum ferro venio; sive verberibus contenta es, curro
nudus ad dominam. Id tantum memento, non me, sed
instrumenta, peccasse, &c. Cap. 130.)
The illustrious Count of Guiche, as we find in the
Count of Buffi’s Amorous History of Gauls, a Book
which caused the disgrace of its Author, on account of
the liberties he had taken in it with the character of
King Lewis the Fourteenth, and his Mistress, Madame
de la Valiere, the Count of Guiche, I say, one of the
first-rate Beaux of the Court of the King just
mentioned, behaved in the same manner that
Polyenos had done. Having committed a fault with the
well-known Countess of Olonne, of the same kind with
that of Polyenos, he wrote the next day to the
Countess in much the same terms as the latter had
done to Circe. ‘If you want me to die, I will bring you
my sword; if you think I only deserve to be flagellated, I
will come to you in my shirt.’ (Si vous voulez ma mort,
j’irai vous porter mon épée; si vous jugez que je ne
mérite que le fouët, j’irai vous trouver en chemise.)
The celebrated Earl of Essex, in one of the
misunderstandings between him, and Queen
Elizabeth, having given her a more than common
cause of offence, and wishing in a particular manner to
soothe her resentment, wrote to her in much the same
terms as those abovementioned. He gave the Queen,
as we find in Camden, explicit thanks for the
corrections she had inflicted upon him, and kissed (to
use his words, as recited by the above Author) and
‘kissed her Majesty’s Royal Hand, and the rod which
had chastised him.’ Not that I propose, however, by
quoting the above expressions of the Earl, positively to
affirm that they were meant to allude to any express
corrections of the kind mentioned in this Book, which
his Royal Mistress had at any time used to inflict upon
him, or the other persons in her service; but yet, when
we, on the one hand, attend to the invariable
corruption, profligacy, shamelessness, wickedness,
and perverseness of Ministers, ever since the
beginning of the world, and on the other, consider to
what degree those employed by the Princess we
speak of, proved just, and zealous for the public good,
we cannot help thinking that that great and
magnanimous Queen had found out some very
peculiar method of rendering them such[113].
[112] The abovementioned Lord Munson had sat as
one of the Judges at the King’s Trial: he lived at St.
Edmundsbury, when his Wife, with the assistance of
her Maids, served him with a flagellation. An allusion to
the same fact is also made in a song which is to be
found in the Collection of Loyal Songs. The thanks her
Ladyship received from the Sessions Court, were
owing to its being generally suspected the Noble Lord
had altered his political principles; for which his Wife
had chastised him.
It really seems that a kind of flagellating fanaticism
had taken place, in those days, in this Country, similar
in many respects to that which arose in the times of
Cardinal Damian and Dominic the Cuirassed: there
was this difference however, that it had for its object to
flagellate, not one’s-self, but others; which was the
wiser folly of the two. The thanks publicly decreed to
Lady Munson (not to mention several puritanical
publications of those days) are proofs of that
flagellating spirit we mention; as well as the correction
inflicted by Zachary Crofton upon his servant maid
(see p. 238), and the pamphlet he wrote in defence of
it; which was very likely grounded on certain religious
tenets concerning the mortification of the flesh, &c. that
were current in those times.
[113] It came out, in a certain late debate in the
House of Commons (June 1783) that, among the
expences in the office of a prime Minister, about a year
before out of place, there was an article (introduced
among the Stationary ware) of three hundred and forty
pounds for whip-cord, for one year. It is very probably
since the days of Queen Elizabeth, that this kind of
commodity has been made part of the national
expenditure.
 C H A P. XXIII.

Formation of the public Processions of

Flagellants. Different success they meet with,
in different Countries.

THE example which so many illustrious personages

had given of voluntarily submitting to flagellation, and
the pains which Monks had been at, to promote that
method of mortification by their example likewise, as
well as by the stories they related on that subject,
had, as we have seen, induced the generality of
people to adopt the fondest notions of its efficacy.
But about the year 1260, the intoxication became as
it were complete. People, no longer satisfied to
practise mortifications of this kind in private, began to
perform them in sight of the Public, under pretence of
greater humiliation: regular associations and
fraternities were formed for that purpose; and
numerous bodies of half-naked Men began to make
their appearance in the public streets, who after
performing a few religious ceremonies contrived for
the occasion, flagellated themselves with astonishing
fanaticism and cruelty.
The first institution of public Associations and
Solemnities of this kind, must needs have filled with
surprise all moderate persons in those days, and in
fact we see that Historians of different Countries,
who lived in the times when their ceremonies were
first introduced, have taken much notice of them, and
recorded them at length in their Histories or
Chronicles. I will lay extracts from a few of these
different Books, before the Reader; it being the best
manner, I think, of acquainting him with the origin of
these singular flagellating solemnities and
processions, which continue in use in several
Countries.
The first Author from whom we have a
circumstantial account on that subject, is that Monk
of St. Justina, in Padua, whose Chronicle Wechelius
printed afterwards at Basil. He relates how the public
superstitious ceremonies we mention, made their first
appearance in the Country in the neighbourhood of
Bologna, which is the spot where, it seems, they took
their first origin, and whence they were afterwards
communicated to other Countries. The following is
the above Author’s own account.
 “When all Italy was sullied with crimes of every
kind, a certain sudden superstition, hitherto unknown
to the world, first seized the inhabitants of Perusa,
afterwards the Romans, and then almost all the
Nations of Italy. To such a degree were they affected
with the fear of God, that noble as well as ignoble
persons, young and old, even children five years of
age, would go naked about the streets, with only their
private parts covered, and, without any sense of
shame, thus walked in public, two and two, in the
manner of a solemn procession. Every one of them
held in his hand a scourge made of leather-thongs,
and with tears and groans they lashed themselves on
their backs, till the blood ran; all the while weeping
and giving tokens of the same bitter affliction as if
they had really been spectators of the passion of our
Saviour, imploring the forgiveness of God and his
Mother, and praying that He who had been appeased
by the repentance of so many Sinners, would not
disdain theirs.
“And not only in the day time, but likewise during
the nights, hundreds, thousands, and ten thousands
of these Penitents, ran, notwithstanding the rigour of
winter, about the streets, and in churches, with
lighted wax-candles in their hands, and preceded by
Priests who carried crosses and banners along with
them, and with humility prostrated themselves before