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Historicizing Life-Writing and
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Historicizing Life-Writing
and Egodocuments
in Early Modern Europe
Edited by
James R. Farr
Guido Ruggiero
Historicizing Life-Writing and Egodocuments
in Early Modern Europe
James R. Farr · Guido Ruggiero
Editors
Historicizing
Life-Writing
and Egodocuments
in Early Modern
Europe
Editors
James R. Farr Guido Ruggiero
Purdue University University of Miami
West Lafayette, IN, USA Coral Gables, FL, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-82482-2 ISBN 978-3-030-82483-9 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82483-9
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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Contents
1 Introduction: Historicizing Life-Writing

and Egodocuments in Early Modern Europe 1
James R. Farr and Guido Ruggiero
Part I The Self Theorized from a Historical Perspective

2 Montaigne’s Elusive Self: An Essay 19
John Jeffries Martin
3 The Life-Enhancing Value of Life-Writing: On
the Uses and Disadvantages of History in Vasari’s
Lives of the Artists 39
Douglas Biow
4 Benvenuto Cellini Magnanimously Corrects
the Irritating Ignorance of Life Writers in General
and in Regard to My Vita in This Letter from Hell 65
As Written by Benvenuto Cellini to Guido Ruggiero
Part II Historical Approaches to Egodocuments:

Strengths and Doubts
5 Conversion and Crossing Frontiers: The Lives
of the Spanish Monks 89
James S. Amelang
v
vi CONTENTS
6 Everard Nithard’s Memorias: The Jesuits Confessor’s

Quest for Re-Fashioning the Self, People, and Events 107
Silvia Z. Mitchell
7 Egodocuments and The Diary of Constantijn
Huygens Jr. 137
Rudolf Dekker
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 153
Benjamin Marschke
9 Dimensions of the Self in Autobiographical
Life-Writing: James Boswell’s Journals and William
Hickey’s Memoirs 187
James R. Farr
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 209
Deanna Shemek
11 A Dutch Notary and His Clients 243
Mary Lindemann
12 Genres and Modes of Women’s Life-Writing: Anne
Clifford and Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans 269
Mihoko Suzuki
Index 313
Notes on Contributors
James S. Amelang (b. Louisville KY 1952) has recently retired from

his position as Professor of Early Modern History at the Universidad
Autónoma of Madrid, where he began teaching in 1989. He has
published a wide range of works on the urban, social, and cultural history
of early modern Spain and is perhaps best known for his studies on the
life writing of artisans in the early modern period, notably The Flight of
Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe (Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 1998). His other books include Honored Citizens of Barcelona:
Patrician Culture and Class Relations, 1490–1714) (Princeton University
Press, 1986), Parallel Histories: Muslims and Jews in Inquisitorial Spain
(Louisiana University Press, 2013), and most recently, Writing Cities:
Exploring Early Modern Urban Discourse (Central European University,
2019).
Douglas Biow is the Superior Oil Company-Linward Shivers Centen-
nial Professor in Medieval and Renaissance Studies and Director of
the Center for European Studies and the France-UT Institute at the
University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of a number of arti-
cles and six books: Mirabile Dictu: Representations of the Marvelous
in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (University of Michigan Press,
1996); Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in
Renaissance Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2002), the recipient of a
Robert W. Hamilton Book Award; The Culture of Cleanliness in Renais-
sance Italy (Cornell University Press, 2006); In Your Face: Professional
vii
viii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Improprieties and the Art of Being Conspicuous (Stanford University

Press, 2010); On the Importance of Being an Individual: Men, Their
Professions, and Their Beards (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015);
and his most recent book, Vasari’s Words: The “Lives of the Artists” as a
History of Ideas in the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge University Press,
2018). He has been the recipient of a number of scholarly awards,
including NEH, Delmas, and Guggenheim Fellowships.
Rudolf Dekker studied history at the University of Amsterdam and
wrote a dissertation on riots and revolts in the 17th century. He
taught history at the Erasmus University Rotterdam (1981–2010) and
now directs a research group on autobiographical writing and history
at the Huizinga Institute—Research School for Cultural History. His
books include Family, Culture and Society in the Diary of Constan-
tijn Huygens Jr (Brill, 2013) and translated a selection in The Diary of
Constantijn Huygens Jr, Secretary to Stadholder-King William of Orange
(Panchaud, 2016). Other books are Humour in Dutch Culture of the
Golden Age (Palgrave, 2001), with Lotte van de Pol The Tradition of
Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe (Macmillan, 1989), and with
Arianne Baggerman Child of the Enlightenment, Revolutionary Europe
Reflected in a Boyhood Diary (Brill, 2009). Recently he published Plagia-
rism, Fraud and Whitewashing: the Grey Turn in the History of the
German Occupation of the Netherlands, 1940–1945 (Panchaud, 2020).
At the moment he is preparing a book about autobiographies written by
criminals in the Netherlands from the 16th to the 21st century.
James R. Farr is the Germaine Seelye Oesterle Professor of History
at Purdue University. He is the author of several books and articles
on French and European history, including Hands of Honor: Artisans
and Their World in Dijon, 1550–1650 (Cornell University Press, 1988);
Authority and Sexuality in Early Modern Burgundy, 1550–1730 (Oxford
University Press, 1995); Artisans in Europe, 1300–1914 (Cambridge
University Press, 2000); A Tale of Two Murders: Passion and Power in
Seventeenth-Century France (Duke University Press, 2005); The Work of
France: Labor and Culture in Early Modern Times (Rowman and Little-
field, 2008); and Who Was William Hickey? A Crafted Life in Georgian
England and Imperial India (Routledge, 2020). He served as editor of
French Historical Studies from 1991 to 2000. He has been the recipient
of several awards and fellowships during his career, among them a John
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ix
Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Council of Learned Soci-

eties Fellowship, and a residency fellowship at the Shelby Cullom Davis
Center at Princeton University.
Mary Lindemann is Past President of both the American Historical Asso-
ciation and the German Studies Association and Professor of History at
the University of Miami. She is the author of numerous articles and books
on early modern European history and the history of medicine. Her
most recent publication is The Merchant Republics: Amsterdam, Antwerp,
and Hamburg, 1648–1790 (Cambridge University Press, 2015). She
has received many major scholarly awards including: two NEH Fellow-
ships (1997–1998; 2017–2018), a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship
(1998–1999), a Fellowship-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute for
Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (2002–2003),
a Fellowship-In-Residence at the Flemish Academic Centre for Science
and the Arts in Brussels (2011), a Senior Research Fellowship of the
State of Lower Saxony (at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel,
Germany 2014–2016), and a Humboldt Research Prize and the Reimar-
Lüst grant jointly awarded by the Humboldt Foundation and the Fritz
Thyssen Foundation (2017–2018).
Benjamin Marschke (Ph.D. UCLA) is Professor of History at Humboldt
State University. He has held fellowships from the German Academic
Exchange Program, the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, the Max Planck Institut
für Geschichte, and the Interdisciplinary Centre for European Enlight-
enment Studies, among others. He is the author of Absolutely Pietist:
Patronage, Factionalism, and State-Building in the Early Eighteenth-
Century Prussian Army Chaplaincy (Max Niemyer Verlag, 2005), co-
author of Experiencing the Thirty Years War, with Hans Medick (St.
Martins, 2013), and co-editor of The Holy Roman Empire, Reconsidered
(Berghan Books, 2010), Kinship, Community, and Self: Essays in Honor of
David Warren Sabean (Berghan Books, 2015), Hallesches Waisenhaus und
Berliner Hof: Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Pietismus und Preußen (2017),
Pietismus und Ökonomie (2021), and Enlightenment at Court (coming
2022). His research has focused on Halle Pietists at the Prussian court and
the relationship of Halle Pietism and the Prussian monarchy in the eigh-
teenth century. He is currently working on changes in political ceremony,
gender/sexuality, luxury/money, and intellectual/academic culture in the
early eighteenth century, focusing on King Frederick William I of Prussia
(1713–1740).
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
John Jeffries Martin is a Professor of History at Duke University. He

is the author of many articles and essays as well as books on Venetian
and European history, including Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics
in a Renaissance City (University of California Press, 1993), winner of
the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Associa-
tion, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004),
and A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making
of the Modern World, forthcoming from Yale University Press. He is the
recipient of several awards and fellowships, among them from the John
Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the
Humanities.
Silvia Z. Mitchell is Associate Professor of History at Purdue University.
She is the author of Queen, Mother, and Stateswoman: Mariana of Austria
and the Government of Spain (The Pennsylvania State University Press,
2019) and guest editor of a Special Journal Issue “The Spanish Habsburg
Court during the Reign of Carlos II,” published in The Court Historian:
The International Journal of Court Studies (2018).
Guido Ruggiero is College of Arts and Sciences Cooper Fellow and
Professor of History at the University of Miami. He has published
numerous articles and books on Italian Renaissance history and culture
including most recently the prize winning The Renaissance in Italy: A
Social and Cultural History of the Rinascimento (Cambridge University
Press, 2014) and Love and Sex in the Time of Plague: A Decameron
Renaissance (Harvard University Press, 2021). An elected member of the
Ateneo Veneto, he has been a fellow, member, and/or visitor at the Insti-
tute for Advanced Study, Princeton; Harvard’s Villa I Tatti; the American
Academy in Rome; and the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
at UCLA among others and held a number of fellowships including a
Guggenheim in 1993.
Deanna Shemek is Professor of Italian and European Studies at the
University of California, Irvine. She is Author of Ladies Errant: Wayward
Women and Social Order in Early Modern Italy (Duke University
Press, 1998) and In Continuous Expectation: Isabella d’Este’s Reign of
Letters (CRRS, 2021). Her editorial collaborations include Phaethon’s
Children: The Este Court and its Culture in Early Modern Ferrara
(MRTS, 2005), Writing Relations: American Scholars in Italian Archives
(Silvana, 2008), and Itinera chartarum: 150 anni dell’Archivio di Stato di
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi
Mantova (2019). She edited and co-translated Adriana Cavarero’s Stately

Bodies: Literature, Philosophy, and the Question of Gender (University
of Michigan Press, 1995). Her Selected Letters of Isabella d’Este (Iter
Press, 2017) won the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women’s
2018 prize for the best translation of a woman’s work. She co-directs
IDEA: Isabella d’Este Archive, an online project for study of the Italian
Renaissance.
Mihoko Suzuki is Professor of English and Cooper Fellow in the
Humanities, Emerita, at the University of Miami. She has written exten-
sively on early modern women’s political writings, in Subordinate Subjects:
Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary Form in England, 1588–1688
(Ashgate, 2003) and in Antigone’s Example: Early Modern Women’s Polit-
ical Writing in Times of Civil War, from Christine de Pizan to Helen
Maria Williams (Palgrave, 2022) as well as in numerous essays, including,
most recently, “Women’s Political Writing: Civil War Memoirs,” in Rout-
ledge History of Women in Early Modern Europe, ed. Amanda Capern
(Routledge, 2019); and “Political Theory across Borders,” in Oxford
Handbook on Early Modern Women’s Writing in England, ed. Sarah
C. E. Ross, et al (Oxford, 2021). She is the editor of The History of
British Women’s Writing, vol. 3, 1610–1690 (2011); and the coeditor of
Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 (2002); The Rule
of Women in Early Modern Europe (2009); Women’s Political Writings,
1610–1725 (4 vols., 2007); and Early Modern Women: An Interdisci-
plinary Journal (2011–2018). Her current projects include women’s
manuscript writings as political discourse in early modern England and
women as authors of epic in early modern Europe.
List of Figures
Fig. 6.1 Alonso del Arco, (1635–1704), Cardinal Juan

Everardo Nithard, 1674, oil on canvas. Museo del
Prado, Madrid, Spain. Inventory P003341 (Photo
credit, Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, NY) 119
Fig. 6.2 Juan Carreño de Miranda (1614–1685), Queen
Mariana of Austria as Governor, c. 1675, oil on canvas.
Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San
Fernando. Inventory 640 (Photo credit, Real Academia
de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid/Art
Resource, NY) 120
Fig. 11.1 Flute ship on a rough sea 259
Fig. 12.1 The Great Picture Triptych (1646) attributed to Jan
van Belcamp (1610–1653). Oil on canvas. Center
panel: 254 × 254 cm; side panels: 254 × 119.38 cm.
AH 2310/81 (Reproduced by courtesy of Abbot Hall
Gallery, Lakeland Arts Trust, England) 277
Fig. 12.2 Lady Anne Clifford, countess of Dorset, Pembroke,
and Montgomery. Circle of Paul van Somer
(1577–1621). c.1618. Oil on canvas. 99 × 79 cm
(Reproduced by courtesy of Titan Fine Art, London) 278
Fig. 12.3 John Bracken (fl. 1660–1721), after Sir Peter Lely
(1618–1680). Anne, countess of Pembroke (Lady
Anne Clifford). 1670. Oil on canvas. 74.8 × 62.7 cm.
AH 730/69 (Reproduced by courtesy of Abbot Hall
Gallery, Lakeland Arts Trust, England) 279
xiii
xiv LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 12.4 Charles Beaubrun (1604–1692) and Henri Beaubrun

(1603–1677). Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans, “La
Grande Mademoiselle.” c.1650. Oil on canvas. P
2198. CCØ Paris Musées / Musée Carnavalet, Paris 280
Fig. 12.5 School of Pierre Mignard (1612–1695). Anne Marie
Louise d’Orléans, Mademoiselle de Montpensier,
called “La Grande Mademoiselle.” Oil on canvas. 140
cm × 110 cm. MV3476. Châteaux de Versailles et de
Trianon (Photo: Daniel Arnaudet / Gérard Blot. ©
RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY) 280
Fig. 12.6 Pierre Bourguignon (1630–1698). Anne Marie Louise
d’Orléans, duchess of Montpensier, “La Grande
Mademoiselle” as Minerva, Protectrix of the Arts,
posed with a medallion portrait of Gaston de France,
duke of Orléans. c.1672. Oil on canvas. 175 cm × 148
cm. MV 3504. Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon
(Photo: Gérard Blot / Christian Jean. © RMN-Grand
Palais / Art Resource, NY) 282
Fig. 12.7 a Appleby Castle. b Appleby Castle (detail) “AP 1671”
(Source Author photo) 284
Fig. 12.8 Skypton Castle. “DESORMAIS” (Source Author
photo) 285
Fig. 12.9 The Countess’ Pillar (detail). The commemorative
inscription can be found below the sundial (Source
Author photo) 286
Fig. 12.10 Memorial to Samuel Daniel. c. 1654. St. George’s
Church, Beckington (Photo: Michael Peverett) 287
Fig. 12.11 a Château de Saint-Fargeau, cour d’honneur. b
Château de Saint-Fargeau. Montpensier’s coat
of arms with the initials AMLO (Anne Marie
Louise d’Orléans); the crown above was destroyed
during the French Revolution (Source Author photo) 288
Fig. 12.12 Portrait of the Grande Mademoiselle displaying
the architectural plan of Château de Saint-Fargeau.
Château de Saint-Fargeau (Photo: Michel Guyot) 289
Fig. 12.13a John Selden, Titles of Honor (1631), title page. STC
22178 copy 3 (Photography by Mihoko Suzuki
from the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library) 290
Fig. 12.13b John Selden, Titles of Honor (1631), p. 876. STC
LIST OF FIGURES xv
Fig. 12.13c John Selden, Titles of Honor (1631), p. 412. STC

Fig. 12.14 a St. Anne’s Hospital, Appleby. b St. Anne’s
Hospital, Appleby. Plaque in the hospital’s chapel
with a quotation from the Psalms: “Blessed is he
that considereth the Poor and needy … cast me
not away in the time of old age” (Source Author photo) 297
Map 11.1 Map of Europe, c. 1730 (Created by Isabelle Lewis) 255

Map 11.2 Map of Baltic, Scandinavian, and Russian Trade Routes
(Created by Isabelle Lewis) 256
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Historicizing Life-Writing

and Egodocuments in Early Modern Europe
James R. Farr and Guido Ruggiero
In The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), Jacob Burckhardt

famously proclaimed that the Renaissance individual was the “first-born
among the sons of modern Europe.” From Burckhardt, the notion of
the autonomous self that exists prior to experience took hold and has
run deep in the modern notion of identity as it has developed over the
past 150 years or so. Few scholars today accept the teleological implica-
tions of Burckhardt’s assertion, but in recent decades significant critical
approaches to ideas of the individual, the self, and identity have been
expressed in a wide range of disciplines, including history.
J. R. Farr (B)
Purdue University West Lafayette, West Lafayette, IN, USA
e-mail: jrfarr@purdue.edu
G. Ruggiero
University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, USA
e-mail: gruggiero@miami.edu
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
J. R. Farr and G. Ruggiero (eds.), Historicizing Life-Writing
and Egodocuments in Early Modern Europe,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82483-9_1
2 J. R. FARR AND G. RUGGIERO
Scholars in pursuit of the self have found personal narratives, usually

of an autobiographical turn, to be especially useful. This is certainly true
in the field of Life-Writing, which emerged in the 1980s and has enjoyed
enormous popularity in a wide range of disciplines, including cognitive,
social, clinical, and counseling psychology, sociology, ethnography, film
studies, literature, literary criticism, and many more. Life-Writing focuses
on texts that record memories and experiences found in many genres,
notably autobiography, memoir, diaries, letters, testimonies, and biog-
raphy.1 Recently, Life-Writing has established itself in institutions like
the Oxford Center for Life-Writing Research at the University of Oxford
and the International Auto/Biography Association. Curiously, however,
the discipline of history has been under-represented in Life-Writing
scholarship.
While the field of Life-Writing was expanding, over the same years
many historians turned their attention to the importance of personal
narratives as historical sources, frequently referred to as “egodocuments.”
Such sources provide an account of privileged information that brings
insight into the historical meanings of the individual, the self, and identity.
Initially, according to Jacques Presser who coined the term in the 1950s,
egodocuments were those historical sources in which “the writing and
describing subject…has a continuous presence in the text” and in which
“an ego deliberately or accidentally discloses or hides itself.” However, as
the range of egodocuments was broadened to texts with no clear authorial
personality, those meanings became, and remain, more difficult to discern.
The overall objective of this volume is to further historicize the
field of Life-Writing by bringing a historical analysis of egodocuments
into it. Both fields—Life-Writing and egodocument history—have been
following parallel trajectories rather than integrated, and this volume
attempts to highlight their commonalities and advance a scholarly conver-
sation between them. The individual as a purposive social actor is a
common denominator that both fields share and provides a vehicle both
theoretical and practical for building a profitable synthesis of two rather
independent traditions of scholarship.
The scholarly analysis of the self was complicated by an epistemolog-
ical challenge in the 1960s and 1970s, when Roland Barthes, Michel
Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and others displaced the author of any text
from his or her central place in the determination of its meaning.2
Still, the value of personal narratives as records of subjective experi-
ence and revealing of individual agency continues to be recognized,
1 INTRODUCTION: HISTORICIZING LIFE-WRITING … 3
and historians have refined their approaches to these kinds of sources.

As the renowned historian Lynn Hunt recently cautioned, the histori-
an’s attention to cultural and social contexts should not result in our
losing sight of the importance of the individual actor in history, and the
popular new field of microhistory confirms this.3 Indeed, the challenge
for historians is to explain the ways in which historical subjectivities are
shaped and transformed by the contexts within which people make their
lives. Egodocuments, like all historical sources, are embedded in socially
constructed norms and expectations. They highlight the importance of
the individual in history and the value of analyzing personal narratives to
reveal the individual as a purposive social actor without losing sight of
constitutive cultural and social contexts.
Each of the essays in this volume is based on one or several egodoc-
uments. The analysis of personal narratives like these opens up avenues
for a deeper understanding of human agency, and when placed in specific
historical contexts, suggestive of the construction of selfhood and iden-
tity.4 Usually, but not always, personal narratives are autobiographical
in nature, as is the case with the egodocuments that Martin, Biow,
Ruggiero, Amelang, Mitchell, Dekker, Marschke, and Farr analyze. But
letters, which are the source of Shemek’s essay, or the images of Suzuki’s,
or even the notarial records of Lindemann’s, also can be understood as
personal narratives. Although personal narratives as egodocuments are
by definition subjective told from the perspective of a unique individual,
human agency studied in contexts demonstrates that individual lives and
the narratives through which their meaning becomes manifest in texts
and/or images are never simply individual, for lives and the narratives
about them draw upon rules, models, and expectations available in partic-
ular times and places that determine a narrative logic and as such can
become meaningful to author and audience alike. Personal narratives,
indeed, all egodocuments, are fashioned in and through available literary
conventions and rhetorical strategies, and always have an eye toward an
imagined reader or audience. The conditions of production and the antic-
ipated audience dictate what is included in the narrative, and what is
not. Personal narratives, then, are never simple reflections or reports of
experience, but are always mediated by the narrator. This points to the
conclusion that these narratives embody not just a discoverable past, but
an anticipated future as well.
The noted literary theorist Paul John Eakin and others concur
and perceive a direct connection between personal narratives and the
construction of selfhood and identity.5 Eakin suggests, in fact, that

the self is a product of narrative constructions, that identity formation
is fundamentally, socially, and discursively transacted. This means that
despite our proclivity to imagine that identity somehow emerges from
some mysterious interiority or is the consistent product of the developing
individual over the life course (both of which are fictions of the histor-
ically specific modern self, as Farr suggests in his essay on Boswell and
Hickey), selfhood and identity are socially constructed (their source is
other people) and, as Martin demonstrates in his analysis of Montaigne,
are temporally discontinuous—we are not now who we were.
Modern studies of identity in the early modern period tend to shy away
from Burckhardt’s formulation that the Italian Renaissance was a critical
period when an innate sense of self that had been buried by the powerful
traditional forces of collective identity fostered by family, religion, and
culture was finally freed up when those forces were cleared away by the
literally revolutionary changes of that revolutionary age. These changes,
for Burckhardt, finally allowed the full expression of an innate sense of the
individual self to emerge resulting in the discovery of the modern indi-
vidual. Virtually, every essay in this volume asks the question of whether
or not there is an ahistorical core sense of self that stands at the heart of
that individual’s deepest virtual ontological reality.
A fundamental challenge of this formulation was advanced in the late
twentieth century by literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt, first proposed
in his seminal Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare.6
Greenblatt, in contrast to Burckhardt, argued that the idea of an inner
sense of an individual self was a modern artifact, an attractive myth that
obfuscated the reality that there was no transcendent inner core of self.
Rather, this modern sense of self was in reality a historical construct
formed by the webs of the culture in which one lives, generated by the
economic, social, and religious realities that actually mold and limit how
we think of ourselves, even as we feel that we are freely self-fashioning
individuals. This understanding of the self in many ways was shaped in
the context of a twentieth-century vision that saw ideas of the individual
as essentially modern, and a modern fiction at that, perhaps most recently
pressed by Michael Foucault and his followers with their emphasis on
the role of the disciplinary discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, disciplinary discourses that drive and form the way people think
of themselves as individuals.
Greenblatt, taking his analysis back to the Tudor period in Renaissance

Self-Fashioning in a typically self-referential confession, admitted: “When
I first conceived this book… [i]t seemed to me that the very hallmark
of the Renaissance [turned on the fact] that middle-class and aristocratic
males began to feel that they possessed… shaping power over their lives,
and I saw this power and the freedom it implied as an important element
in my own sense of myself.”7 In sum, he began his study with a vision
very close to Burckhardt’s. “But as my work progressed,” he admitted,
“I perceived that fashioning oneself and being fashioned by cultural insti-
tutions – family, religion, state – were inseparably intertwined. In all my
texts and documents, there were, so far as I could tell, no moments of
pure unfettered subjectivity. Indeed, the human subject itself began to be
remarkably unfree, the ideological product of the relations of power in
a particular society.”8 The self that life-writing, egodocuments, or biog-
raphy attempt to discover, then, Greenblatt realized, was a fiction and a
“remarkably unfree” one at that.
Indeed, the contributors to this volume, echoing scholars from a range
of disciplines within Life-Writing (including neuroscience, psychiatry, and
psychology), recognize the uncertainty of the nature of the self, and they
fundamentally question the notion of the autonomous self and the atten-
dant idea of continuous identity unfolding in a unified developmental self.
Instead, they suggest that the self is variable and unstable in its historical
meanings, and can only be grasped by exploring selves situated in histor-
ical contexts and revealed through a variety of historical documents. The
very meaning of the self is irrevocably socially and historically specific, as
Eakin has observed. The self is, in Eakin’s words, “mediated by avail-
able cultural models of identity and the discourses in which they are
expressed.”9
In the opening essay of the first part of this volume—“The Self Theo-
rized from a Historical Perspective”—John Martin proposes a “relational
model” of pre-modern identity that opens up to a degree Greenblatt’s
self, trapped in the webs of power beyond its control by essentially shifting
the frame of reference. Rather than the inner-outer division that has
typified modern discussions and left the outer dominant for Greenblatt,
Martin suggests seeing identity in the Renaissance as not about one or the
other but rather about how the two actually exist in a relationship that
turns on the problem of the relation of one’s inner experience to one’s
living and experiencing in the world.10 Neither then is dominant. And
significantly this relational building of self creates a complex polyvalent
self that in its interactions with the world is not trapped in the webs of
culture and institutions, but rather is in a constant process of reformu-
lating that relationship, as Martin suggests was the case with Montagne.
What Martin found missing in both Burckhardt and Greenblatt was the
multi-layered nature of interiority creating a tendency to overlook the
significance of things such as “experience, meaning, will and the body”
in the actual historical process of living and interacting with the world.
Thus, tellingly for Martin, Montaigne’s very provisional nature of self
and continuous re-evaluation of all things including the self offer a model
for a more humane, kind, and gentle relationship with society, others,
and one’s sense of self even in today’s troubled times. His essay offers a
point of departure for the discussions to follow in this book that make his
observations even more relevant.
Most of the other essays in the volume develop aspects of this hypoth-
esis of the unstable, constructed self or aspects of it in ways that
complicate and enrich Greenblatt’s original formulation of self-fashioning.
Douglas Biow, for example, in the very next essay underlines this vision
with its analysis of the way Giorgio Vasari in his famous Lives progres-
sively emerged as a biographical subject between the first and second
editions of the work as Vasari becomes more comfortable with his role as
an historian and writer of the lives of artists and his success in doing so. In
this, much as suggested by Martin, Biow demonstrates how an evolving
sense of a relational self emerges in Vasari’s interaction with his world,
his writing, and his reflections on himself. Biow tackles the complex rela-
tionship between history and biography with a close examination of how
the two inter-relate. Using Nietzsche’s reflections on history as a point
of reference, he analyzes how Vasari’s Lives live up to Nietzsche’s more
positive vision of history (against his more negative concerns) as a crit-
ical tool for forming new modern übermenschen, much influenced in this
again by Burckhardt’s vision of the Renaissance individual. Nietzsche’s
critical analysis of history, then, provides the frame for an examination
of Vasari’s Lives, first as history and then as biography. Thus, crucially
for Biow in that attempt to make the past personal via biography, we see
the progressive emergence of the author, Vasari himself, as a biograph-
ical subject between the first and second editions of the work. In this,
much as suggested in Martin’s essay on Montaigne, an evolving sense of
self emerges in Vasari’s interaction with his world, his writing, and his
reflections on himself.
But perhaps the most radical reformulation of the ideas surrounding a

constructed self and the issues of agency and individual action and free
will are to be found in the essay written from Hell by Benvenuto Cellini
and transcribed by Guido Ruggiero. This essay introduces the idea of
“consensus realities” that Ruggiero in his recent books and articles has
offered specifically to add some room for agency in Greenblatt’s vision.11
Indeed, this formulation was stimulated by a conversation that Green-
blatt had with Ruggiero and his students at the University of Miami early
in this century where he lamented the lack of agency and freedom in
his vision that he saw as the negative heart of self-fashioning. Essentially,
Ruggiero’s suggestion is that pre-modern identity was actually largely an
imagined reality, but no less real for that: a series of consensus realities,
then, that individuals negotiated with the various groups that surrounded
one and judged who one really was in the small intimate world of the
day. In those negotiations that a Renaissance individual conducted with
the groups that surrounded him, or significantly her as well, in society, a
person played a meaningful role in fashioning their “consensus realities”
and their individual often polyvalent selves, through interaction with the
different groups of friends, family, peers, fellow workers, neighbors, and
so forth who populated their world. In these ongoing negotiations, one
had a certain agency in creating selves, albeit limited by cultural and insti-
tutional constraints and the limits of imagination in a particular historical
moment, and perhaps more significantly by the groups with whom one
interacted, but with considerable room for play and agency within those
limits. Significantly, in this more complex vision, there is more space for
the role that non-elites, women, and less visible institutions and everyday
culture play in the process of negotiating a self, and a wider social context
that is largely lacking in Greenblatt’s more “top down” vision of society.
The concept of “consensus realities” often figures explicitly or implicitly
in subsequent essays in this volume, notably when women and non-elites
are considered.
Cellini ends his essay/tirade, arguing more radically that modern biog-
raphers often err in trying to construct a unified vision of the self for their
subjects, because, especially in the early modern period, a person was, in
fact, a multiplicity of selfs negotiated in different forms with different
groups. In that world of multi-layered negotiated selfs, a unified self was
simply not possible, in this way adding to Martin’s and Biow’s vision of
an evolving sense of self, a polyvalent self, that reappears in most of the
essays of this volume.
Part Two of this volume—“Historical Approaches to Egodocuments:

Strengths and Doubts”—continues the exploration of the historical mean-
ings of the self through analysis of biographical and autobiographical texts
with studies by James Amelang, Silvia Mitchell, Rudolf Dekker, Benjamin
Marschke, and James Farr.
Amelang introduces his essay with a brief analysis of the impact of
the trajectory of the careers of many of the contributors to this volume
from quantitative social history to cultural history, suggesting the weight
of the personal biography even on the writing by historians on biog-
raphy. In that vein, he describes his own developing fascination with
autobiographies by non-elite figures which has characterized his own
scholarship.12 In this essay, he discusses two fascinating purported autobi-
ographies printed in England in the 1620s by the Spanish ex-friars, Juan
Nicolás y Sacharles and Fernando Tejeda. Both rejected their Catholic
upbringing to embrace Protestantism and published books to justify
their conversions, The Reformed Spaniard (1621) and Textus Retextus
(1629). Examining these texts, then, as examples of autobiography deeply
colored by confessional issues, Amelang raises deeper questions about the
sincerity and truthfulness of autobiography. But moving beyond those
well-discussed concerns, what chiefly interests Amelang is how life-writing
was used in these works to support and reflect on the individual and
mobility (both geographical and confessional) and, in turn, once again
on an evolving self from both perspectives in the early modern period.
Suggestively, in light of the earlier essays in this volume, Amelang’s focus
on mobility of place and belief offers another example of an evolving sense
of self that was layered, complex, and not particularly unified (at least
over time), even in these works that claim a more traditional Augustinian
autobiographical narrative toward grace and salvation. And, he concludes
that the focus of biography and autobiography on the individual and the
particular (much like microhistory) allows a scholar to move beyond the
necessary suspicion of half-truths and fictions to consider the more impor-
tant and ultimately perhaps more knowable historical question, why: why
were these lives told and what did that telling mean for understanding
their time and their subjects.
Silvia Mitchell considers how the Jesuit Everard Nithard’s Memorias
can be seen as a revealing form of historical egodocument. For although
it was a hybrid work, in over 8000 pages and twenty-one volumes that
mixed documents and a historical/biographical personal narrative that
claimed to be based upon those documents, it served as a self-justifying
work that reveals much about his sense of self and his time. In it, Don
Juan, the illegitimate son of the late Philip IV of Spain, became the
villain who maneuvered to break up Nithard’s close relationship with
Mariana of Austria, widow of Philip IV and queen regent for her minor
son the future Carlo II. Don Juan, as Nithard tells it, sought to gain
power for himself, while Nithard became the hero/victim of his own
narrative. Reading behind this literally self-serving text, Mitchell argues
that one discovers a particularly rich example of the strengths and weak-
nesses of egodocuments that can be read as autobiographical: documents
that provide “privileged information about the ‘self’ that produced it.”
Once again using Greenblatt’s self-fashioning as a point of reference,
she considers how in selecting and editing the documents to include
and constructing his narrative, Nithard, without major lies or inventions,
carefully constructed a self-justifying portrait of his historical self and his
times. Her analysis, however, focuses on the way the work actually func-
tions as a historical text of value when its self-justifying self-fashioning is
factored into the analysis. With this critical reading, Mitchell teases out a
more accurate version of the events described and an example as well of
how a historian can work with such documents avoiding their pitfalls and
taking advantage of their unique strengths.
The Dutch historian Rudolf Dekker provides an overview of the devel-
opment of egodocument history before turning to analysis of the diary of
Constantijn Huygens Jr., the personal secretary of William of Orange who
later became King William III of England. Dekker, a pioneer in recog-
nizing the usefulness of egodocuments in history writing, observes some
trends in historical scholarship that pointed toward this recognition. In
the latter decades of the twentieth century, social historians (including
many of the contributors to this volume), perceiving the limitations of
quantitative objective methodologies, turned toward cultural and micro-
history and an appreciation for the subjectivities of human experience,
especially among common people. Diaries, letters, and autobiographies
then emerged as ideal sources for analyzing everyday practices, common
beliefs, and manners.
Dekker himself stands as a witness to these trends. As he studied
riots and revolts in seventeenth-century Holland, he began to recog-
nize that behind the limitations of formulaic judicial archives lay personal
testimonies that opened up new perspectives on the history of law and
criminal activity. He soon embarked on a massive project to catalogue a
comprehensive inventory of Dutch egodocuments written between 1500
and 1918, an inventory whose ready accessibility has already stimulated a

significant amount of research. Dekker has recently turned his attention to
the diary of Constantijn Huygens, Jr., and in this essay sketches some of
his preliminary findings and offers suggestions of how this massive source
(over 2000 pages of manuscript) records, often on a daily basis, infor-
mation that is useful for political, military, social, and intellectual history
as well as illustrating how the diary is a genre within autobiographical
writing in general. Though Huygens is not given to self-reflection in his
writings, within these pages we find private conversations between the
notoriously enigmatic Prince William of Orange and Huygens, as well
as ample information about military campaigns, juicy gossip about the
sexual manners of Dutch and English aristocrats at William’s court, and,
with Huygens’ repeated attention to clocks and watches, to a new linear
understanding of time.
In Chapter Eight, Benjamin Marschke focuses on two particular
aspects of life-writing and egodocuments in early modern Europe
and echoes Eakin’s observations about relational identity: the place of
other people in one’s own life-writing and the life-writing of corpora-
tions/institutions/dynasties. This essay uses as an empirical basis the life-
writings and “self-narrations” of King Frederick William I of Prussia (r.
1713–1740) and his children King Frederick II of Prussia and Wilhelmina
of Bayreuth.
First, Marschke explores the use of other people as foils to “self-
narrate.” Even during his own lifetime Frederick William was best known
as “the father,” and Frederick William, his reign, and his self-narration
are invariably overshadowed by that of his son and successor, Frederick
II (“the Great”). Marschke then turns his analysis to examples of life-
writing and egodocuments of Frederick William’s children (Frederick II
and Wilhelmina) by examining how they described themselves in contrast
to their father. In so doing, he uncovers how one person’s autobiograph-
ical life-writing unintentionally becomes biographical life-writing about
another.
Second, Marschke explores the life-writing of corpora-
tions/institutions/dynasties through Frederick II’s Memoirs of the
House of Brandenburg. Though people understood themselves and their
predecessors in institutions as “individual” persons, the “life-writing” of
an institution (such as a dynasty) creates a narrative arc or plot (including
various turning points) and transcends individual people (including the
author). Thus, the autobiographical life-writing of the institution (written
by its foremost representative) is laid over that of individuals, including

the author, whose own life-writing again relies on the contrast with the
lives of others, his predecessors and particularly his father.
In Chapter Nine, James Farr offers a broad overview of the historicity
of the self from the Renaissance to the early nineteenth century and
questions recent arguments about the supposed emergence in the late
eighteenth century of the introspective self as the fundamental hallmark
of the modern self. Instead, Farr shares with other contributors to this
volume an understanding of the self in terms of inter-relational dimen-
sions, or modalities—specifically the socially-turned or performative and
the reflective—and depending on historical context, one or the other
assumed prominence. The interior dimension, the sense of self as a unique
product of inwardness and reflection, is a historically variable expression
no less than the self defined by social relations.
The modern, Western self has frequently been characterized by deep
interiority, and autobiographical writing is often assumed to be the genre
that most clearly expresses it, but Farr suggests in his analysis of auto-
biography in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries generally and
of two examples of autobiographical writings in particular—the journals
of James Boswell and the Memoirs of William Hickey—that inwardness
is but one dimension of the self, and in autobiographical writing in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was the exception rather
than the rule. The vast majority of late eighteenth and early nineteenth
century autobiographical publications—and there are legions of them—
are pre-occupied with detailing the author’s position in relation to various
external factors (prominently reputation), not in revealing a coherent
narrative of an unfolding interior identity which the word autobiography,
thanks to the canonization of certain texts like Wordsworth’s Prelude, has
come to connote. Farr concludes that if we are going to go in search of
the foundational Romantic self, the prototype of the modern inward self,
popular autobiographical writing is not the place to go looking for it.
The final section of the book—“Pushing the Limits of Life-Writing
with a Wider Range of Historical Sources”—offers explorations of letters
as egodocuments by Deanna Shemek, of notarial records by Mary Linde-
mann, and of portraits, architectural monuments, wills, and funeral
orations by Mihoko Suzuki.
In Chapter Ten, Shemek suggests that letters from the Italian Renais-
sance, both letter collections intended for wide circulation (and usually
published) and more personal letters (some published, but many still in
archives), significantly enlarge the number of egodocuments that we have

from the period that might qualify as life-writing. Looking first at printed
letter collections and then more private and often personal letters in terms
of the way they were constructed to build differing consensus realities
(recalling Cellini) about the lives of their authors especially in the context
of their ability to function as “performances” of self for the groups around
them in society, Shemek analyzes the way letters can be read as a rich
historical source much like autobiographies and memoirs. In fact, many
of the suggestions of Martin’s essay on Montaigne and Cellini’s essay
from hell return here and are central to Shemek’s suggestions for a more
nuanced, historical reading of letters. Shemek analyzes, then, in more
detail the important collection of letters of Niccolò Machiavelli, both
public, as an official of the Florentine Republic, and his apparently more
private letters with a small circle of friends and supporters after his fall
from power; and Isabella d’Este massive archive of letters both public and
private that have been the focus of her path-breaking research and publi-
cation for the last two decades. And she concludes that both used their
letters to construct literary self-representations that served the various
consensus realities that they sought to project through their writing to
the various groups that they negotiated their sense of self with across
their lives—thus, revealing what rich if complex and potentially valuable
egodocuments such letters can be. Much more than color or apparently
innocent, un-reflected moments of self-description, these often carefully
constructed works are self-fashioning at its most revealing, so much so
that at times she suggests in their artfulness they actually served to create
the self as a renaissance work of art.
In Chapter Eleven, Mary Lindemann’s suggestive essay breaks new
ground by considering the potential of treating the rich notarial records
of the early modern period as yet another form of egodocument. In this,
it brings to mind the way that early Italian diaries or ricordi, as they were
called, started out as essentially records of business transactions and slowly
evolved into forms of egodocuments and biographies. She sees this type
of documentation offering three primary possibilities for reconstructing
life stories, in this case of notaries and the merchants they served in early
modern Amsterdam. First, such records offer the possibility to recreate
a picture of the “life-world” in which they lived and worked and in the
process to peer into their mental and imagined life, even if they lack a
traditional narrative format and tend to be more public and scripted, than
private. Second, given their orientation toward business life and practical
matters, they also tend to reveal the crucial material dimensions of iden-
tity often overlooked or invisible in other sources. And finally, because
they record “scriptural interactions” between notaries and their clients,
they suggest ways in which both notaries and clients in these documents
were “thinking with a story” that they constructed about their lives and
their selves. Looking more closely at the trade that these documents
described, she stresses the theme of risk that characterized their mental
world and the influence of external factors on the way they constructed a
sense of self for their creators (both notaries and merchants)—geopolit-
ical, but also seasonal, topographical, environmental, and material, noting
that these are often not considered when using more traditional biograph-
ical documentation. Lindemann concludes: “Yet, in fact, geography and
geographical horizons, seasons, winds, waters, waves, and natural prod-
ucts, such as wood and salt, were as constitutive of identities as the more
traditionally accepted influences of family relations, political contexts,
social constraints, and cultural expectations.” Thus, Lindemann expands
significantly the range of possible documentation on the early modern
sense of self and egodocuments.
In the final chapter of the volume, Mihoko Suzuki’s essay on the
life-writing and self-fashioning of Anne Clifford, countess of Pembroke,
Dorset, and Montgomery and Anne Marie Louise d’Orleans, duchess
of Montpensier moves beyond letters to discuss a much wider range
of potential historical documentation for life-writing. These two major
women of the seventeenth-century, one English and one French, she
argues, contrary to traditional claims that women’s life-writing in the
pre-modern period was essentially private and subjective, actually inten-
tionally presented radical challenges to patriarchal authority and the
closely related political claims of absolute rulers that went well beyond
the private. Perhaps most pertinent for this volume, however, is the way
that Suzuki shows how a life and a self can be fashioned or constructed
with more than autobiography, memoirs, or letters. She begins, however,
with an examination of their memoirs, but then moves quickly to explore
the portraits that they commissioned of themselves, surrounded by the
symbols of their learning, power, and claims of independence from patri-
archal authority. This use of art is then expanded with an examination
of the way both women’s building programs also furthered their self-
fashioning, with an eye on the present but also toward posterity, by
showing how they rebuilt their extensive estates as a representation of
their own power and independence. Then, looking at the books that
Clifford owned and the markings she made in those books, Suzuki
suggestively teases out supporting evidence for Clifford’s reservations
about both absolute rule and the power of husbands and family over
women. And although we do not have similar information for Montpen-
sier, Suzuki looks at that powerful woman’s extensive writings, finding
once again support for her earlier conclusions about her rejection of auto-
cratic kingship and in support of her own identity and power as a baroness
and a leader. Suzuki, then, shows how both women attempted through
their wills to project their power and their sense of self into the future with
their bequests to family and to charity. Finally, a survey of their funeral
orations provides a window on how successful they were in breaking free
from patriarchy and autocratic rule and also suggestively how threatening
their self-fashioning could be. From memoirs to marks in books and on
to portraits, buildings, and eulogies, in this essay the range of sources
available for examining self-fashioning and the role it played in the early
modern period is significantly and creatively expanded.
The contributors to this volume, despite the diversity of source mate-
rial and time and place, share the conclusion that there is no coherent self
that predates representations of who one “is.” Identity is not essential,
but constructed. Both the self and identity can be expressed especially
in egodocuments in which meaning is embedded in personal narratives
that are historically and culturally specific and structured by local under-
standings and expectations. These texts, then, are not only open to, but
require empirical, historical inquiry and call for the melding of historical,
literary, and biographical approaches both in theory and in practice that
the essays in this volume propose. But we mean just that—propose—for
they are offered as an opening to new approaches and new practices and
by no means the final word on a vital and rapidly developing field.
A Note on Terminology and Jargon:
We have attempted to limit the jargon in this volume, especially
as the Life-writing field has developed quite an impressive range of
terminology—suggestive, new, and unfortunately at times confusing. Of
course, one person’s jargon that should be eliminated is another’s tech-
nical language essential for discussing the complex issues of their discipline
and significant for naming precisely issues that were previously obscured
by lack of a clear terminology. But in many ways this complexity and flour-
ishing of terminology is a result of the fact that we are not dealing with
one field, but rather several where scholars have been creatively rethinking
life-writing, egodocuments, biography, and autobiography, each devel-

oping their own language/jargon to describe their developing disciplinary
approaches to the self. Therefore, we have asked the contributors to this
volume to eliminate jargon where possible and limit technical terminology
to where it is absolutely necessary for precision or to take arguments
deeper and frame arguments in the current technical vocabulary of the
disciplines being discussed. But in the end, we hope that the discussions
in this volume will encourage a move toward a unity in terminology, even
as they suggest interesting ways of expanding the type of texts under
consideration and the field itself.
Notes
1. Although the contributors to the recent collection of essays, The
Biographical Turn: Lives in History, Hans Renders, Binne de Haan
and Jonne Harmsa, eds. (London: Routledge, 2017), make an
important plea for the inclusion of biography in the field of life-
writing, they seldom probe the historical meanings of personal
narrative, identity, and self as do the contributors to this volume.
2. See Séan Burker, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism
and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2008).
3. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W.W.
Norton, 2007), 34.
4. See Mary Jo Maynes, Jennifer L. Pierce, and Barbara Laslett,
Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social
Sciences and History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008);
Jaber Gubrium and James Holtstein, Analyzing Narrative Reality
(London: Sage, 2009); and Barbara A. Misztal, Theories of Social
Remembering (Birkshire: Open University Press, 2003).
5. Paul John Eakin, Living Autobiographically: How We Create Iden-
tity in Narrative (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008); Paul
John Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1999); Dan P. McAdams, Ruthellen
Josselson and Amia Lieblich, eds., Identity and Story: Creating Self
in Narrative, (Washington, DC: American Psychological Associ-
ation, 2003); Margaret R. Somers, “The Narrative Construction
of Identity: A Relational Network Approach,” Theory and Society
23 (1994); Jerome Bruner, “Self-Making Narratives,” in Autobio-

graphical Memory and the Construction of a Narrative Self, Robin
Fivush and Catherine Haden, eds. (Mahway: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, 2003), 209–225; Sherry B. Ortner, Narrativity in
History, Culture, and Lives (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan,
1991).
6. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to
Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
7. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 256–57.
8. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 256–57.
9. Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories, 4.
10. See John Jeffries Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism
(Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 1–20 espe-
cially.
11. See especially Guido Ruggiero, The Renaissance in Italy: A Social
and Cultural History of the Rinascimento (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2015).
12. James Amelang: The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in
Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
PART I
The Self Theorized from a Historical

Perspective
CHAPTER 2
Montaigne’s Elusive Self: An Essay
John Jeffries Martin
For many years, a copy of Donald Frame’s The Complete Essays of

Montaigne, a book I first purchased in college, lay on my bedside table. I
confess I was not a systematic reader of this work, but I did occasion-
ally pick it up and read one or two of Montaigne’s individual essays,
usually shorter pieces such as his “Of Idleness” or “Of Thumbs,” just
before falling asleep. I was mesmerized by Montaigne’s learning, by his
curiosity, by his wit. But I also went to his text for the most old-fashioned
of reasons: I believed (and I still do believe this) that Montaigne offered
insight into the human condition. And in moments of personal difficulty
I turned to him. I found his sense that we can never really know ourselves
strangely reassuring.
But experience can change our relation to a text. In mid-life, I found
myself upon a most uneven patch. Unsettled, I was no longer certain
that selves were the relatively stable entities that I had earlier taken them
to be—admittedly without having given the matter much thought. In
J. J. Martin (B)
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
e-mail: john.j.martin@duke.edu
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 19

Switzerland AG 2022
J. R. Farr and G. Ruggiero (eds.), Historicizing Life-Writing
and Egodocuments in Early Modern Europe,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82483-9_2
20 J. J. MARTIN
this selva oscura, my more youthful certainties about the meaning of

such common coins as “self” and “individual” did not exactly unravel,
but they frayed. And in this spirit or dispirit, I found myself drawn back
to Montaigne, now less for pleasure or at least for pleasure alone than
for understanding. He had, as I knew from my more leisurely reading,
made himself the subject of his book. “Je suis moy-mesme la matiere de
mon livre,” he announces to the reader in his 1580 preface to the Essais.
And in exploring Montaigne’s self-portrait, I was enticed by his ability
to find his voice even while acknowledging the instability and elusive-
ness of his subject. Perhaps, I thought, by examining the way he explored
and understood the self, I could find a way of calming the storm that had
interrupted my own life. Indeed, the more I explored Montaigne’s insight
that it was possible, while portraying himself in movement, to discern
nonetheless “une forme maitresse” (“a ruling pattern”) that underlay or
shaped his identity, the more aware I became that Montaigne had offered
a persona that so many of his readers would find compelling, if not liber-
ating. But how did the world in which Montaigne lived shape his ideas?
Above all, what was it about the persona that Montaigne fashioned that
proved so attractive to men and women not only in the late sixteenth and
throughout the seventeenth century but even down to our time? What
might we learn, in reading Montaigne, about the history of the self?
Fortunately, when I began to read Montaigne with a new intensity,
his world was not entirely unknown to me. While I had not previously
focused on sixteenth-century France in a sustained way, I nonetheless had
some grasp of its history from my more general studies of early modern
Europe. Above all I knew that Montaigne’s world was in upheaval.
Born in 1533, Michel Eyquem—only later did he assume the name
Montaigne—lived through a period of exceptionally rapid and unsettling
changes that he recorded over and over again in the Essais. The European
encounter with the New World, the challenge posed by the Protestant
reformers to traditional religious beliefs, the spiraling of religious violence
especially in the France of his adulthood, the intensification of the circu-
lation of printed books and pamphlets, and intellectual ferment in almost
all fields of learning—these were all developments that pressed in on
Montaigne even in his refuge in his tower library on his estate just outside
Bordeaux. Surely, such forces as these—combined both with his uncanny
mastery of Latin (it is said that he was the last European for whom
this was his first language) and with his deep knowledge of classical and
modern writers—would leave their imprint on his understanding not only
2 MONTAIGNE’S ELUSIVE SELF: AN ESSAY 21
of himself but also of the self more generally.1 Attention to Montaigne’s

own world, therefore, seemed essential.
Yet how does one draw a connection between the larger historical
setting and ideas about the self? At the time that I first asked this
question—even before turning to Montaigne—there were, it seemed to
me, two reigning models. The first—associated above all with the writ-
ings of the nineteenth-century historian Jacob Burckhardt—viewed the
period of the Renaissance as one in which earlier, more collective or
communal notions of identity gave way to a growing sense of individ-
ualism. And even though Burckhardt had focused primarily on what
we would today describe the early Renaissance—that is, the revival of
ancient learning in Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—both
the Swiss scholar Hugo Friedrich and the American Donald Frame, two
of Montaigne’s most influential twentieth-century biographers, would
extend Burckhardt’s general analysis to the late Renaissance in France,
portraying Montaigne himself as an especially compelling exhibit in the
history of the rise of individualism.2
Significantly, what underlay this Burckhardtian vision was the assump-
tion that the conditions that made the emergence of individualism
possible were not so much particular events or sets of ideas but rather
deep rearrangements in the social order that stemmed from a crisis in late
medieval civilization. As traditional social solidarities such as the family
and the guild dissolved—so the argument maintained—spaces opened up
in which individual men and women could assert themselves in new ways.
Accordingly, this Burckhardtian tradition did not problematize the self.
To the contrary, it assumed that the self was a person’s core identity that
had simply been submerged in collective ties before the Renaissance when
it finally broke free. It was, therefore, a universal entity. Its variations
stemmed only from whether or not the social context in which it was
embedded repressed it or enabled it to express itself. And even though
Burckhardt himself had recognized that these new forms of individuality
could carry with them negative implications, in the more anodyne treat-
ments of this theme, the reigning narrative of the history of the Western
self became the story of the triumph of individualism in which the Renais-
sance and early modern period were viewed as foundational for new forms
of identity that would prove essential to the making of modern politics
and economies both of which, at least ostensibly, depended on individual
freedoms and desires.
22 J. J. MARTIN
Crucially, shortly before I began my own study of the history of the self
in the Renaissance, a new model of the generation of identities, while not
entirely eclipsing the Burckhardtian paradigm, offered a radically different
perspective. In his work Renaissance Self-Fashioning, published in 1980,
the American literary historian Stephen Greenblatt rejected the notion
of the Renaissance self as a transcendent core identity. In its place, he
offered a study not of the way in which human subjects freely fashioned
themselves but rather of the way in which certain political and religious
forces in the Renaissance created the fiction of individual autonomy in
the first place. In this account of Renaissance identities, the self became
a cultural artifact, a historical and ideological illusion generated by the
economic, social, and religious upheavals of the period. Thus, unlike
Burckhardt, who had stressed long-term shifts in the very structure of
society, Greenblatt focused on more immediate vectors of power—espe-
cially in the Tudor court—as the shaping forces of Renaissance identities.
To a large degree, Greenblatt’s shift away from the narrative of the rise of
individualism to a more “neutral” focus on the self as a historical artifact
struck me as immensely valuable for how we might make sense of a figure
such as Montaigne. Greenblatt, after all, offered a fascinating framework
through which it might be possible to uncover the ways that particular
social and political environments shaped particular formations of the self.
Yet I was not convinced by Greenblatt’s tendency—at least at this stage
of his career—to view the self in a radically reductive form. In partic-
ular, Greenblatt’s analysis struck me as overly dismissive of what I saw as
a far more multi-layered understanding of identity in the Renaissance, a
layered-ness that took into account not only the sense of interiority, but
also of experience, the memory, the will, and the body.
Accordingly, in an effort to grasp this complexity—in a work that
focused mainly on early modern Italian materials though with some
attention to Montaigne—I proposed a model of the self that I called
“relational.” Such a model, I believed, made it possible to explore the
history of the self in a less reductive fashion, attending at one and the
same time to questions of what early modern men and women perceived
as their inner experience as they grappled with their own immediate expe-
riences and the broader developments in the world in which they lived.
Identity in the Renaissance, I argued, was not about individuality but
rather explicitly about the problem of the relation of one’s inner experience
to one’s experience in the world.3 With this emphasis, I gave greater weight
to the individual than had Greenblatt but did not claim that there was
such a thing as a transcendent identity. Social pressures did play a role

in fashioning the self. But the Renaissance self, I argued, was not molded
like clay in the hands of a potter. Rather, it was a living thing, which could
only be molded or fashioned up to a certain extent. For instance, when
we consider a child—a living thing—we almost always recognize that its
parents, while able to exercise considerable influence over the child, also
always meet resistance and even a certain degree of independence on the
part of their offspring. The model of the relational self—I believed then—
would make it possible to view the self not primarily or exclusively as a
social artifact or product, but rather to see it as a central aspect of person-
hood dialectically engaged not only with its broader environment but also
with itself. More recently, as I have continued to read Montaigne, I have
come to see that my original formulation of the notion of the relational
self was inadequate. To be sure, it is possible to read Montaigne as a writer
who constantly juxtaposes his own internal thoughts and feelings to the
broader social world around him. But this juxtaposition constituted only
one axis—and a relatively superficial one at that—in his understanding of
his own individual identity and indeed of his understanding of the self.
∗ ∗ ∗
“I study myself more than any other subject – this is my metaphysics,

this is my physics,” Montaigne writes in “Of Experience,” an essay of
the late 1580s.4 Montaigne’s grammar (“Je m’estudie”) is immediately
telling in its reflexivity. The self here is not only a relation, as my model
of the relational self had originally maintained, of the sense of interi-
ority to the external world. Rather, even without taking into account the
“external” world, the self itself was relational, at once a subject (“je”) and
an object (“m[e]”)—or, as Jean Starobinski has put it with exceptional
clarity, for Montaigne, the self is, simultaneously, “le ‘je’ observateur et le
moi observé”—“the observing ‘I’ and the observed ‘me.’”5
Tellingly, the moi or the “observed self” was itself far from stable of
fixed.6 To the contrary, it was constantly in movement. From the very
beginning of his writing of the Essais, he had made this clear. In one of
the earliest essays, “On Idleness,” written in 1572, Montaigne, a consum-
mate horseman, had compared his mind to a “runaway horse” that “takes
far more trouble over itself than it does for others, and gives birth to
so many fantastic chimeras and monsters, one after the other, without
24 J. J. MARTIN
order and without purpose, that, in order to contemplate their absur-

dity and strangeness, I have begun to keep a record of them.”7 A similar
sense of instability and movement informs the self-portrait he offers of
himself in his essay “Of Repentance,” written in the late 1580s. Here, he
conceives of writing as a self-portrait. “Others fashion man” he observes
at the beginning the essay, adding:
I tell of him, and represent a particular one, quite poorly formed….Now

the traces of my brushwork do not go astray, though they change and
vary….I cannot hold my object still. It goes about troubled, staggering
from a natural drunkenness. I take it at this point, just as it is, the instant
that I delight in it. I do not portray being, I portray passing: not the
passing from one age to another or – as the people say – from seven
years to seven years, but day by day, minute by minute. I must adapt my
history to the hour. I may change quite soon, not from fortune alone
but also from intention. This is a register of diverse and changeable acci-
dents, and of irresolute and – when it fails – of contradictory imaginings:
whether I am different myself or whether I take hold of my subjects in
other circumstances and aspects.8
In observing himself, Montaigne is struck above all by his variability, his

inconstancy.9
Moreover, the self does not only vary, it is also multi-layered. This sense
of layered-ness emerges in many facets of the Essais. On the one hand, the
interplay of nature and culture was at work here. “Natural inclinations,”
Montaigne writes, “are helped along and fortified by custom, but they
are hardly changed and even grow in strength,” adding, “we cover them
up; we hide them.” And then he provides a compelling example from his
own experience:
The Latin language is quite natural to me. I understand it better than

French, but I have not spoken, much less written it for the last forty years.
But in moments of extreme and sudden emotions in which I have fallen
two or three times in my life – once when my father, seemingly in good
health, fainted and collapsed into me – I have always let loose words in
Latin the depths of my being. Nature surging forth and expressing itself
forcefully – despite such long-held habits.10
The sequential acquisition of language over the course of Montaigne’s

life—first Latin and later French—becomes for him yet another example
of the complexity of identity. There are multiple layers in the makeup of

a particular person: a natural temperament, a cluster of (often conflicting)
emotions, a primary language, a particular family and education, as well as
broader political, social, and cultural forces—all of these go into shaping
the self, rendering it difficult to grasp in any way as a single core, a single
thing.
Nature too plays a role in the shaping of our identity. Montaigne makes
this clear in “On Some Verses of Virgil,” another late essay. Here, if we
move past the erotic surfaces of the text, in which Montaigne provides
a disarmingly frank account of his past amours, we see that Montaigne
attempted here not only to reflect on his love affairs but also to explore
the layered and multifarious nature of the self. Pointing to the natu-
ralness of the sexual act, he repudiates the idea that sex is in any way
shameful. “What has the sexual act – so natural, so necessary, so just –
done to men that they dare not speak about it without shame, and to
exclude it from serious and proper speech?”11 This is an important move.
Montaigne’s language about sexuality celebrates its naturalness. He will
talk frankly about it, because it is a fundamental part of who he is. And
it is not an act that is confined to marriage. “Marriage,” he writes, “has,
for its part, utility, justice, honor, and constancy – an even pleasure, but
more universal. Love bases itself on pleasure alone, and in fact, is more
excitable, livelier, and sharper – a pleasure heightened by difficulty.”12
But, despite these differences, there is in both cases, as Montaigne
describes it, something profoundly natural about the body (not the soul)
reaching out to another body. Indeed, it does so, he writes, often without
the mind’s consent in his celebrated, though patently ironic, “defense” of
the penis and its “wayward liberty…intruding so annoyingly when we
have no use for it, and failing so annoyingly when we have the most use
for it.”13 Montaigne portrays the body as something that is often beyond
the control of the will. But it is not only our sexual organs that have a life
of their own. “This same cause that animates this member animates also,
without our knowledge, the heart, the lungs, and the pulse – the sight of
an agreeable object, imperceptibly expanding in us a flame of a feverish
emotion. Are these the only muscles and veins that rise and lay down,
without the consent not only of our will but also of our thoughts?”14
Yet his own sexuality was never simply a function of his nature. Culture
also came into play, as he makes clear in his ethnographic account of
the variety of sexual customs across a world that was becoming increas-
ingly familiar in the so-called “age of discovery.”15 There are countries,
26 J. J. MARTIN
Montaigne writes in his essay “Of Custom,” where women “piss while
standing, and men when crouched…where fathers take care of punishing
boys, and women, by contrast, of girls….And, in some places elderly
husbands offer their wives to young men to enjoy, while in others women
are held in common without sin.”16 But Montaigne also makes it clear
that the will and the imagination also play a key role in shaping sexu-
ality. In “Some Verses of Virgil,” Montaigne focuses on the will. To be
sure, aspects of human sexuality are accidental, resulting in occasional
sins. Of these, Montaigne argues, one could repent, credibly promising
not to commit them again. And in such cases, Montaigne adds, “vices
leaves repentance in the soul, like an ulcer in the flesh.”17 But other sins
are more constitutional, acts, that is, to which the individual repeatedly
assents. “But concerning these other sins so often repeated, planned out
and carried through – whether temperamental sins or sins of one’s profes-
sion or vocation – I cannot imagine that they have been planted for such a
long time in a single heart without one’s reason and conscience constantly
desiring them and understanding them in this way. And the repentance
that some claim come to them in prescribed moments is a little hard for
me to imagine or conceive.”18 Repentance was not possible, that is, for
those sins that are constitutional. For these sins, Montaigne maintains, as
we have seen in his discussion of his past love affairs, the mind and one’s
desires have already consented. They are practiced over and over again;
they are habitual. “Rooted and anchored in a strong and vigorous will,
they are not subject to contradiction.”19 It would be hypocritical to claim
that one could repent of them, and be changed or reformed. For in such
cases, “repentance is nothing but the denial of our will and an opposition
to our fantasies.”20
Sexuality depended also on the imagination and its ability both to
impede and to enable the sexual act. In an early essay, “On the Force
of the Imagination,” Montaigne tells the story of a friend who, after
hearing the story of an acquaintance’s impotence and then experiences it
himself was “from that point on subject to relapse, this vile memory of his
failure rebuking and dominating him.”21 But the imagination could also
impower the male lover. Later in this same essay, Montaigne relates how,
on the wedding night of a friend, he—Montaigne—provided his acquain-
tance with a kind of talisman that would ensure good sexual performance
with his bride. Montaigne himself rejected the magical qualities some
attributed to the object but believed firmly that this experiment proved
the power of the imagination, since his friend’s confidence was so greatly
increased by his faith in the object.22 “But all this,” he writes, “can be
attributed to the narrow seam between the spirit and the body as they
communicate their fortunes to one another.”23
Yet the self’s complexity lay not only in this layering but also in
one’s experience over time. The truth about oneself—Montaigne shows—
cannot be limited to one moment. Moreover, one’s view of one’s past acts,
that is, changes over time. Thus, “On Some Verses of Virgil” is simul-
taneously a confession of his youthful pursuits of the pleasures of the
body (forgiven already by Montaigne to himself because they were, he
claims, pleasures sought under conditions of honesty) and of his now
mature, even aging pursuits of the memory of pleasure. He is clearly not
confessing to reform his youth. He is explicit about this. His recollec-
tion of his plaisirs provides solace. He not only does not condemn his
thoughts; he savors them. They rescue him from his melancholia. They
are part of who he is. He had been particularly clear about the fact that
confession is not transformative in his essay “On Repentance,” where,
with considerable irony, he condemns those older men who now claim
to be pure: “When all is said and done, I hate the accidental repen-
tance that age brings. He who once said that he was obliged to the years
for having stripped him of his desire has an opinion different from my
own.”24 “I shall never be grateful,” Montaigne continues, “to impotence
for the good it does me….Youth and pleasure did not ever cause me
to fail to recognize the face of vice in sensual pleasure. Nor does the
distaste that the years bring me now cause me to fail to recognize the
face of sensual pleasure in vice. Even though I am no longer in that state,
I judge it as though I were.”25 Given this temporal dimension of iden-
tity, Montaigne makes it clear that the effort to come to terms with one’s
identity cannot be in a simple act of confession. Finally, the self is not
only multi-layered and changeable, it is complex to know. “ We are all
patchwork, and of such an unformed and diverse make-up that each part,
each moment plays its part. And there is as great a difference between us
and ourselves as between ourselves and others,” Montaigne writes before
citing Seneca: magnam rem puta unum hominem agere – “judge it a great
thing to play the part of one single man.”26
In writing about himself in these varied ways, Montaigne—as it was—
confesses. He does so, however, against the grain both of his fellow
Catholics and of the Calvinists whose numbers in France had expanded
significantly in his lifetime. To be sure, Protestants and Catholics practiced
confession in opposing ways. Catholics confessed their sins to a priest,
28 J. J. MARTIN
while Calvin had in his writings over the course of the mid-sixteenth
century stressed the need for the Christians to make their confessions
directly to God and, in doing so, to express themselves as openly and
honestly as possible, laying bare their inmost thoughts. Yet Montaigne
rejects both these forms of confession. The Catholic practice fostered a
form of self-revelation that was overly structured and that made it impos-
sible, in Montaigne’s view, to capture the complexity of identity and of
sin, while the Protestant form of confession, though freer, was equally
likely to result in an overly schematic view of self. For Montaigne, as
his Essais make clear, the process of self-disclosure was inevitably more
complex. It required not a single act of confession but rather a sustained
effort in the exploration of self over time and in different circumstances—
precisely the form of self-revelation Montaigne practiced in the Essais.
And, even then, the goal of self-understanding would be limited.27
Rather, one must make a sustained effort to come to terms with one’s
own identity. “I have commanded myself to dare to say all that I dare
to do.” “The diseases of the soul,” he continues, “grow obscure in their
strength…This is why it is often necessary to bring them to the light
of day, with a pitiless hand: to open them up and tear them from the
depths of our breast.”28 Yet the matter is not only one of self-disclosure,
it is also a matter of frank talk about sex, which is usually disavowed,
hidden, disguised. Montaigne is perturbed by the hypocrisy of those who
“send their conscience to the brothel while they keep their countenance
in order.”29 And he declares in an exquisitely ironic passage that he will
take a different path:
In favor of the Huguenots, who denounce our practice of auricular and

private confession, I confess in public, religiously and purely. St. Augustine,
Origen, and Hippocrates published the errors of their opinions; I those of
my morals. I am happy to make myself known and I care not to how many,
provided it be truly. Or, to say it better, I hunger for nothing but I have
a mortal fear of being taken for someone other than I am by those who
happen to know my name.30
In a fundamental sense, then, Montaigne’s Essais, despite their

open character, transcend the very practice of confession itself. From
Montaigne’s standpoint—and I do not think I am exaggerating here—the
central problem with confession lay in its insincerity. From his perspective,
to confess either as a Catholic or as a Protestant was to enter too easily
into a claim of self-knowledge and of reform. Either this would result in

a cheapened mode of reform—for example that of the old man repenting
of his youthful excesses—or an unnecessary one. And Montaigne’s public
reflections on sexuality made this especially clear.
Like many of his contemporaries, Montaigne was disturbed by the
hypocrisies of his generation, and he warned his readers not to let them-
selves be taken in neither by the appearance nor by the words of those
who are always different on the outside than they are within.31 But
Montaigne did not believe that confession in the traditional religious
sense could close the gap between one’s interior and one’s public life.
If, that is, sincerity was for most of Montaigne’s contemporaries, the
outward expression or avowal of one’s internal beliefs and feelings—an
ethic modeled on confession—for Montaigne, sincerity was a far more
wrenching process: not the expression of one’s beliefs or feelings but
rather the portrayal of one’s very being. This was Montaigne’s most
radical claim: “I want others to see me in my simple way, natural and ordi-
nary, without study or artifice, for it is myself that I portray.”32 The image
of portraiture, as we have seen, is fundamental. Moreover, even when
Montaigne discusses his frankness, it is as though he is describing a kind
of hydraulic process and not a sense of the need to express himself: “But
besides the fact that I am made this way, I do not have a supple enough
mind to dodge an unexpected request or to escape it by some sort of
evasion, nor to counterfeit a truth, nor sufficient memory to retain some-
thing so counterfeited, nor certainly enough self-confidence to sustain it.
It is from weakness that I am virtuous. Therefore, I abandon myself to
candor, and – both by constitution and by design – to always saying what
I think, leaving it to fortune to guide the outcome of the matter.”33
Yet Montaigne’s decision to write, to take an inventory of himself in
different moments and in different settings, helps him in the end get at
something more fixed: “In shaping this figure upon myself,” Montaigne
writes, “I have had to fashion and compose myself so often to extract
myself that the pattern became fixed and not of its own accord. Portraying
myself for others, I have portrayed myself in colors brighter than my orig-
inal ones. Have I wasted my time in having given such a continual and
such curious account of myself? ….For those who go over and over them-
selves only in their imaginations or occasionally in their speech do not
examine themselves so pressingly nor do they get at the heart of things
about themselves, as does one who makes this his study, his labor, and his
trade, and who commits himself to keep a register over the long run, with
30 J. J. MARTIN
all his faith and all his strength.”34 It is in this dynamic sense—with a deep
consciousness of the mutability, even the fluidity of self—that Montaigne
claims he is setting forth nature, not artifice: “The rest of us, especially
those of us who conduct a private life, which is visible only to us, ought to
have established an interior pattern by which to judge our actions, which
at times compliments and at other times chastises us. I have my laws and
my court by which I judge myself, and I address myself to them and
not to others.”35 He calls this pattern “une forme maistresse.” “There is
no one who, if he attends to himself, does not discover in his own self
a ruling pattern which resists not only education but also the storm of
passions which oppose it.”36
Montaigne’s self, therefore, was not shaped purely by the ways he
negotiated the relation between his external world and his sense of his
interior life—his thoughts and feelings. It could not, that is, be captured
by the model I had originally suggested in my formulation of the rela-
tional self as central to the Renaissance experience of individual identity.
Rather, his understanding of the self was far more intricate, far richer.
Perhaps most powerfully it depended, again as Starobinski has noted, on
the dialectic of the observing “je” and the observed “moi.” The “moi”
consists—Montaigne makes this clear—of tendencies and proclivities of
the author, as he observes himself. Its most striking characteristic is that
it is always shifting and fluctuating, never fixed. But it is also layered,
consisting of the body, the will, the imagination, language, and memory.
Even the observant “je” or “I”—which floats outside the “moi” and is
itself a constituent part of the self—while perhaps not as fluctuating a cate-
gory as the “moi,” is also both complex and subject to change. Moreover,
its capacity “to know” either itself or the “moi” is limited, since the mind,
as Montaigne makes clear in his “Apology for Raimond de Sebonde,” is
limited. And, finally, while it makes a grammatical claim to represent the
author, its ontological status is, in fact, vague. Is the “je” Montaigne or
is it a character that Montaigne has invented for the Essais ? In short, the
“je” is not capable of providing a sense of a fixed or stable self any more
than the “moi.”
Montaigne offers his readers, therefore, a radically elusive portrait
of the self. And, given its elusiveness and its complexity neither the
Burckhardtian notion of a core, individual identity finally escaping the
more collective ties of the late Middle Ages nor Greenblatt’s notion of
Montaigne’s contribution to the fashioning of a fictive sense of individual
autonomy can capture this complexity. Nor did my original notion of the
relational self provide an adequate account. Montaigne’s self may have

been, in part, a relation, but it was much more—a “more” that ultimately
escapes definition. In the end, Montaigne refuses to define the self.
Nonetheless, this very notion of the elusive self proved attractive to
early modern readers, not so much replacing as offering an alternative to
earlier models of the person. Most obviously, in Montaigne’s sustained
consideration of the both ancient and medieval theories of the soul in
the “Apology,” he broke from the traditional emphasis of the soul as the
basis of the individual’s identity.37 But he also broke from more contem-
porary theories of the self. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the
Italian humanist-diplomat Baldassare Castiglione had published Il Corte-
giano, a text that would come to play a major role in the fashioning of the
ideal courtier-aristocrat over the early modern period.38 Like Montaigne’s
Essais, Castiglione offered his readers a work that would help his readers
navigate the difficult waters of court life in an age of powerful princes.
Above all, Castiglione suggested, in such a world one must be pruden-
tial and decorous, careful to express one’s views in a discreet and often
indirect way. As Federico Fregoso states at a crucial point in the dialogue,
the courtier “should consider well what it is he does or says, the place
where he does it, in whose presence, at which time, the reason he does
it, his age, profession, the goal toward which he strives and the means
of reaching it; and, thus, with these considerations, let him accommo-
date himself discreetly to all that which he wishes to do or to say.”39
Castiglione, in short, proffered a model of the prudential self, one that
minimized not only the interior experience of individuals but also their
freedom to give expression to their thoughts or professions in the context
of court life.
Then, in his writings of the mid-sixteenth century, Calvin had offered
a model of the self—one that was radically opposed to Castiglione—
that, as we have seen, emphasized the need for frank, open expression
of one’s individual thoughts and feelings. But Montaigne broke from
both these models. Like Calvin, he rejected the artificiality implicit in
the model of the courtly self that Castiglione had counseled, while at the
same time rejecting Calvin’s confidence that it would be possible to give
direct expression to one’s own self, since in his view, the self—given its
complexity—could not be expressed in a simple or reductive way.40 For
Montaigne, a true portrait of the self would almost always be partial. And
it could not be reduced either to confession in the tribunal or the confes-
sional. Or to put this in a simpler form: if, for Calvin, the self was the
32 J. J. MARTIN
heart or the soul (something intrinsic), for Montaigne, the self was the
constant interplay of mind and heart, of judgment and feeling, of stability
and change. The self remained elusive.
Montaigne’s representation of the self would have a far-reaching influ-
ence on elite readers in his own age on those of the next two or three
generations. After all, his very construction of the elusive self provided
an important counterpoint to the religious certainties—so destabilizing
and which had done so much to contribute to the civil wars in France
across Montaigne’s adulthood—of his time. This was evident also in the
doubts Montaigne had expressed in his rejection of confession, but his
most powerful expression on this front was his “Apology for Raimonde
de Sebonde,” the longest essay in his volume, and a work that also offered
Montaigne’s most trenchant criticisms of the claims to final understanding
that some were making for the new learning in cartography, in medicine,
and in natural philosophy.41 Moreover, his view of the self also provided
a new way to make sense of the New World, the topic of his essays “Of
Cannibals” and “Of Coaches,” but also a theme in the “Apology.” Above
all, for Montaigne, the world in its movements and its ultimate unknowa-
bility became a mirror for the self. “Our world has just discovered another
world,” Montaigne writes, but then immediately asks “and who will guar-
antee us that it is the last of its brothers, since the daemons, the Sibyls,
and we ourselves have been ignorant of this one?” stressing our inability to
know it fully.42 But he also underscored its mobility.43 “The world is but
a perennial seesaw. All things in it are in constant motion: the earth, the
rocky outcroppings of the Caucuses, the pyramids of Egypt,” an image of
movement he uses as an explicit parallel to the inconstancy and instability
of the self in his essay “Of Repentance.”44
But how do we relate the broader social and cultural environment of
early modern France to the emerging sense of the self as Montaigne
portrayed it? Perhaps a first clue to this question lies in Montaigne’s
decision in 1571—the year he turned 38—to withdraw from public life,
retiring to a library that he had installed in a tower on his estate just
outside Bordeaux. Here, in a circular room lined with books, Montaigne
enjoyed a strikingly peaceful existence against the backdrop of the civil
wars that were growing increasingly violent in just these years (the St.
Bartholomew Day Massacre took place in 1572). And we know from
the Essais how much Montaigne himself treasured this book-lined space.
“It is necessary to maintain a back shop all our own, completely free, in
which we might establish our true liberty and our principal retreat and
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arrive at; manage, interfere; proceed, tend, move, go; contribute,
increase, accrue, constrain, bring about, occasion, require; shape,
fabricate, construct, fashion, frame, manufacture, perform, do;
become, compose, constitute, create, establish, effect, execute,
reach, get, render.
Ant. Abolish, demolish, annihilate, break, disintegrate,
unmake, undo; destroy, defeat, mar, disestablish, miss, lose, fail
of; upset; misrepresent, mismanage; hesitate, stop; decrease,
diminish.
Maker. Creator, former, manufacturer, builder, constructor;
author, composer, writer, compiler.
Ant. Destroyer, exterminator, annihilator.
Make up. Collect; constitute, form; reconcile, settle, adjust,
compose; make good, compensate; supply, furnish, provide;
determine.
Ant. Distribute, disperse, scatter; pi; default.
Mal- or Male-. A prefix denoting ill. For words thus compounded
and not found here, see the synonyms and antonyms of the root
word, from which derivatives may be readily chosen.
Malady. Disorder, distemper, disease, sickness, ailment, illness;
complaint, indisposition.
Ant. Health, sanity, vigor, robustness, soundness.
Malediction. Curse, cursing, execration, imprecation,
denunciation, anathema.
Ant. Benediction, blessing, praise, compliment.
Malefactor. Evil-doer, culprit, felon, criminal, convict, outlaw.
Ant. Benefactor, hero.
Malice. Spite, ill will, malevolence, grudge, pique, bitterness,
animosity, malignity, rancor, maliciousness, virulence.
Ant. Good will, benevolence, kindliness.
Manacle, n. Handcuff, shackle, fetter.
Manacle, v. Handcuff, shackle, fetter, bind, chain.
Ant. Unbind, unfetter, unchain.
Manage. Direct, govern, control, wield, order, contrive, concert,
conduct, transact; administer, regulate, supervise, superintend,
handle, rule.
Ant. Mismanage, misgovern, misconduct, upset, misuse,
derange; let go.
Manageable. Tractable, governable, controllable, tamable, docile.
Ant. Unmanageable, untamable, uncontrollable, ungovernable,
difficult, impracticable, impossible, refractory.
Management. Conduct, administration, government, guidance,
direction, care, charge, contrivance, intrigue; skill, address;
economy, treatment, superintendence, surveillance; negotiations,
dealings, transactions.
Ant. Misconduct, maladministration, mismanagement.
Manager. Director, superintendent, supervisor, comptroller,
governor, overseer, conductor; economist.
Ant. Workman, follower, workingman, employee.
Mandate. Command, commission, order, charge, precept,
injunction, requirement, edict.
Ant. Petition, request, entreaty, suggestion.
Maneuver (Manœuvre), n. Management; stratagem, artifice,
scheme, plan, trick, ruse, intrigue; evolution, movement;
operation, tactics, contrivance.
Ant. Countermovement, defeat, check, bafflement,
counteraction, detection, neutralization.
Maneuver, v. Perform an evolution, move; scheme, plot, intrigue,
manage, contrive.
Ant. Counteract, play up to, check, checkmate.
Mangle. Cut, bruise, mutilate, lacerate, maim, hack, tear; destroy,
mar, spoil; polish, calender, smooth, press.
Ant. Restore, heal.
Manhood. Virility, maturity; humanity; courage, resolution,
bravery, hardihood, fortitude, manliness, manfulness.
Ant. Womanhood, femininity; effeminacy; cowardliness,
cowardice, delicacy.
Mania. Insanity, derangement, madness, lunacy, aberration,
alienation, delirium, frenzy.
Ant. Sanity, health, soundness; poise, self-control.
Maniac. Lunatic, madman, insane, bedlamite.
Manifest, a. Open, clear, evident, apparent, visible, conspicuous,
plain, obvious; patent, palpable, unmistakable, distinct,
indubitable.
Ant. Hidden, indistinct, inconspicuous, occult, latent, obscure,
confused, hazy, foggy.
Manifest, v. Reveal, declare, evince, make known, disclose,
discover, display, show, exhibit, evidence, expose.
Ant. Hide, cover, conceal.
Manifold. Various, duplicate, multiplied; numerous, many,
multitudinous; diverse, multifarious; sundry.
Ant. Few, rare, limited, scarce, scant; uniform, facsimile.
Mankind. Man; humanity, humankind; men; society.
Ant. Womankind; childhood; divinity, deity, Heaven, God;
earth, world, universe, nature, creation; cattle, animals,
minerals, vegetables.
Manly. Bold, daring, valorous, courageous, undaunted, hardy,
dignified; intrepid, heroic, vigorous, firm, noble, chivalrous;
mature, masculine, manlike.
Ant. Womanly, childlike; timid, womanish, childish, unmanly,
boyish, weak, dastardly, cowardly; effeminate.
Manner. Mode, custom, habit, deportment, fashion, air, look,
mien, aspect, appearance; behavior, conduct; method, form, style.
Ant. Being, action, proceeding, life, work, performance, project,
business.
Mannerism. Characteristic, peculiarity, uniformity, self-
repetition, self-consciousness, affectation, idiosyncrasy, specialty.
Ant. Unaffectedness, simplicity, naturalness, character,
genuineness.
Mannerly. Civil, complaisant, respectful, courteous, polite,
urbane, refined, well-behaved, ceremonious, well-bred.
Ant. Rude, coarse, unmannerly, rough, impolite, uncivil,
boorish.
Manufacture, n. Making, production, fabrication; product,
composition, construction, manipulation, molding.
Ant. Use, consumption, employment, wear.
Manumission. Release, emancipation, liberation, deliverance,
enfranchisement, dismissal, discharge.
Ant. Slavery, capture, subjugation; restraint, repression,
coercion.
Manumit. Release, liberate, enfranchise, free, emancipate.
Ant. Enslave, capture, subjugate, enthral.
Many. Frequent, manifold, diverse, divers, sundry, numerous,
multiplied, various, abundant, multifarious.
Ant. Few, rare, scarce, infrequent, scanty.
Mar. Injure, mark, spoil, ruin, blemish, damage, disfigure, deface,
hurt, harm, impair, maim, deform.
Ant. Make, mend, restore, improve, reinstate, enhance, repair,
conserve.
Marauder. Plunderer, robber, ravager, pillager, outlaw, bandit,
brigand, freebooter, rover, invader.
Ant. Guard, sentry, keeper, steward, ranger, outpost.
Margin. Border, edge, brim, lip, rim, brink, verge, confine, limit,
skirt, boundary, extremity; loophole, profit, interest, leeway.
Ant. Center, main, space; limitation, stringency, restriction.
Marine. Naval, nautical, maritime; oceanic, salt-water, pelagic.
Ant. Terrene, fresh-water, terrestrial, land.
Marital. Connubial, nuptial, hymeneal, conjugal, wedded,
matrimonial.
Ant. Single, unwedded, celibate.
Maritime. Marine, oceanic, nautical.
Ant. Terrene, land.
Mark, n. Impress, stamp, vestige, impression, imprint, track,
evidence, proof, characteristic, badge, indication; distinction,
eminence, importance.
Ant. Effacement, obliteration, erasure, plainness.
Mark, v. Remark, notice, regard, heed, show, betoken, characterize,
denote, stamp, imprint, impress, brand; label, designate, observe,
stigmatize, signalize, specify, specialize; decorate.
Ant. Overlook, ignore, omit; mislabel, misindicate, mismark.
Marked. Noted, notable, prominent, remarkable, eminent,
distinguished, conspicuous.
Ant. Ordinary, mean, commonplace, everyday,
undistinguished.
Marriage. Matrimony, wedlock, wedding, espousal, nuptials,
conjugal union, spousal, union.
Ant. Divorce, celibacy, virginity, bachelorhood, widowhood,
maidenhood.
Marrow. Medulla, pith, essence, quintessence; gist, substance,
cream, kernel.
Ant. Excrescence, surplusage, redundancy, superfluity; surface,
exterior; amplification; body, volume, mass.
Marsh. Fen, swamp, quagmire, morass, bog, slough.
Ant. Solid ground.
Marshal, v. Order, arrange, direct, guide, lead, rank, array,
dispose, draw up; herald.
Ant. Disarray, misguide, disarrange, disorder.
Martial. Warlike, military, soldierly, brave.
Ant. Peaceful, unmilitary, unwarlike.
Martyrdom. Martyrlike state; torture, torment, persecution;
confession.
Ant. Denial, retraction; abjuration, renegation.
Marvel, n. Wonder, prodigy, miracle; surprise, astonishment,
amazement, admiration; portent, phenomenon.
Ant. Commonplace, imposture, cipher, farce, trifle.
Marvelous. Wonderful, astonishing, surprising, strange,
improbable, incredible; miraculous, stupendous, extraordinary,
wondrous, supernatural, portentous, prodigious.
Ant. Commonplace, everyday, regular, normal, customary,
natural, anticipated, current, calculated, expected.
Masculine. Male, manly, virile, manlike; strong, robust, powerful,
bold, hardy, courageous.
Ant. Feminine, womanly, womanlike, female; effeminate,
womanish.
Mask, n. Cover, disguise, pretext, subterfuge, screen; revel, frolic,
evasion, pretense, ruse, plea; redoubt; domino, blind, veil;
hypocrisy.
Ant. Truth, nakedness, candor, verity, openness; exposure,
detection, unmasking.
Mask, v. Disguise, cover, hide, protect, conceal, veil, shroud,
screen.
Ant. Expose, unmask, discover, detect.
Mass. Quantity, sum, bulk, magnitude, body, size, main part,
majority; aggregate, whole, totality; heap, assemblage,
combination, concretion.
Ant. Fragment, section, portion, bit, morsel, minority, segment.
Massacre, v. Murder, butcher, kill, slaughter, slay.
Ant. Preserve, spare, rescue, restore.
Massive. Compacted, weighty, heavy, massy, ponderous, bulky,
huge, immense, vast, solid, colossal.
Ant. Slight, slender, frail, airy; petty, small, light.
Master, n. Ruler, director, manager, leader, employer, owner,
governor, superintendent, commander, captain; teacher,
instructor, tutor; adept; possessor, proprietor; professor, head,
chief.
Ant. Servant, slave, pupil, employee, subject, learner, student.
Master, v. Conquer, subdue, vanquish, overcome; acquire, learn.
Ant. Yield, fail, surrender, succumb.
Masterly. Imperious, domineering, arbitrary, despotic; skilful,
clever, expert, dexterous, adroit; finished, excellent, artistic,
consummate.
Ant. Humble, obedient, compliant, rude, clumsy, bungling.
Mastery. Authority, dominion, supremacy; victory, triumph,
preëminence, ascendency, superiority; acquirement, attainment,
acquisition; skill, dexterity, cleverness, ability.
Ant. Subservience, tutelage, submission, guidance, obedience,
inexpertness, ignorance; defeat, failure, surrender.
Masticate. Grind, chew.
Ant. Bolt, gobble, swallow.
Match, n. Equal, mate; contest; union, marriage; competition, trial;
companion; pair.
Ant. Superior, inferior; disparity, mismatch, oddity, inequality.
Match, v. Mate, rival, oppose, equal; correspond; adapt, fit, suit;
marry; harmonize; join, couple, combine.
Ant. Fail, exceed, surpass, preponderate; separate, dissociate.
Matchless. Unequaled, peerless, unparalleled, incomparable,
inimitable, consummate, exquisite, excellent, surpassing,
unrivaled.
Ant. Common, ordinary, mediocre, everyday, commonplace,
general.
Mate, n. Companion, associate, compeer, match, equal; fellow,
intimate; assistant, subordinate; peer.
Ant. Stranger; superior, inferior; principal, chief, head.
Material, n. Substance, solidity, weight, stuff, matter.
Ant. Work, production, design; spirit, purpose.
Material, a. Corporeal, physical; important, essential; momentous,
vital, weighty; bodily.
Ant. Spiritual, sublimated, incorporeal, evanescent, ethereal.
Matrimony. Marriage, wedlock.
Ant. Celibacy, virginity.
Matron. Wife, widow, dame; housekeeper, head nurse; dowager.
Ant. Girl, maid, maiden, virgin, spinster, miss, lass.
Matter. Substance, body, material, constituency; concern, affair,
business; trouble, difficulty; amount, portion, space; sense,
significance, moment; import, importance; topic, subject, question;
thing, event.
Ant. Immateriality, incorporeality, spirituality; mind, soul,
spirit, intellect; animus, zeal, temper.
Mature. Ripe, perfect, ready, perfected, completed, full-grown.
Ant. Raw, crude, blighted, immature, undeveloped, unripe.
Matutinal. Morning, dawning, early, waking.
Ant. Vesper, evening, late, waning, twilight.
Maudlin. Tearful, sentimental, weak, silly; drunken; intoxicated,
inebriated, tipsy, muddled.
Ant. Dry, sober, sensible, unsentimental, unromantic.
Mawkish. Nauseous, disgusted, squeamish; insipid, flat, stale,
sickly, disgusting, loathsome, maudlin.
Ant. Sensible, savory, fine, sound, palatable, pungent.
Maxim. Principle, axiom, proverb, aphorism, apothegm, adage,
saying, saw, dictum, precept, rule.
Ant. Sophism, quibble, absurdity, enigma, paradox.
Maximum. Greatest; climax, zenith, apex, acme, culmination,
completion, utmost, ultimate.
Ant. Minimum, least; morsel, fragment; initiative,
commencement; decrease, wane; incompletion, abortion.
Maybe, ad. Perhaps, possibly, haply, mayhap.
Maze. Labyrinth, intricacy; bewilderment, uncertainty, perplexity;
embarrassment.
Ant. Clue, elimination, explication; solution.
Meager. Thin, lean, lank, poor, gaunt, starved, hungry, emaciated,
barren, scanty.
Ant. Stout, brawny, fat, chubby; abundant, fertile, copious.
Mean, n. Middle, medium, average, intermediate point; (pl.)
resources, property, revenue; media.
Ant. Extreme, excess, exorbitance, enormity, extravagance;
poverty, end, purpose, object.
Mean, v. Purpose, intend, design; signify, import, indicate, denote,
express.
Ant. Do, perform, execute; say, state, enunciate, declare.
Mean, a. Ignoble, abject, beggarly, wretched, degraded, degenerate,
vulgar, vile, servile, menial, groveling, slavish, dishonorable,
disgraceful, shameful, despicable, contemptible, paltry, sordid.
Ant. Noble, kingly, heroic, princely, exalted, generous, eminent,
honorable, spirited, liberal, masterly, worthy, bountiful,
munificent.
Meaning. Purpose, aim, intention, import, design, object; sense,
explanation, significance, interpretation, force, purport,
acceptation.
Ant. Statement; proceeding; affidavit, declaration.
Meanness. Stinginess, illiberality, sordidness, vileness,
penuriousness, niggardliness, abjectness, baseness; destitution,
poverty, lowness, scantiness, smallness, rudeness, selfishness.
Ant. Nobleness, generosity, unselfishness, liberality, large-
heartedness.
Measure, n. Dimension, capacity, quantity, amount; moderation,
restraint; extent, limit, proportion, degree; rule, gage, standard;
meter.
Ant. Bulk, mass; segment, section, portion; immensity, infinity.
Measureless. Unlimited, infinite, immeasurable, immense,
boundless, limitless, vast, unbounded.
Ant. Circumscribed, finite, limited, bounded, restricted.
Mechanic. Artificer, artisan, handicraftsman, hand, craftsman,
operative, workman.
Ant. Artist, designer, planner, architect, constructor.
Mechanical. Approximate, empirical; machine-made; automatic,
involuntary, blind; habitual, unreflective, spontaneous, effortless,
unimpassioned.
Ant. Labored, feeling, self-conscious, forced, spirited,
appreciative, lifelike, lively, animated, impassioned.
Meddle. Interfere, handle, disturb; intrude, interpose, intervene,
intercede; mediate, arbitrate.
Ant. Withdraw, retire, remove, recede, retreat.
Meddlesome. Meddling, intrusive, officious; pragmatical,
interfering; impertinent, obtrusive.
Ant. Unobtrusive, modest, unofficious, shy, retiring,
unassuming, reserved.
Mediate, v. Intervene, reconcile, interpose, intercede, arbitrate.
Ant. Retire, withdraw, let be, leave, abandon.
Mediation. Interposition, intercession, intervention, arbitration,
interference, adjustment, reconciliation.
Ant. Indifference, neutrality; non-interference.
Mediator. Reconciler, intercessor, interceder, advocate, umpire,
propitiator.
Medicament. Remedy, specific, medicine, cure, relief, help,
restorative.
Ant. Irritant, infection, aggravation, hurt, disease.
Medicate. Drug, treat, heal, cure.
Ant. Harm, infect; catch, contract.
Medicine, n. Drug, physic, remedy, medicament; antidote,
corrective, salve, cure; therapeutics.
Ant. Poison, virus, bane; aggravation.
Mediocre. Moderate, indifferent, ordinary, mean, medium,
average, middling, commonplace.
Ant. Superior, inferior, extraordinary, distinguished,
distinctive.
Mediocrity. Inferiority, average, moderate or middle state,
medium; moderation; commonplace, mean; sufficiency.
Ant. Excellence, superiority, distinction, brilliance, rarity.
Meditate. Consider, ponder, revolve, study, weigh, plan, contrive,
devise, scheme, purpose, intend; contemplate, muse, reflect, think,
cogitate.
Ant. Execute, enact, complete, consummate.
Medium, n. Middle, mean; moderation, average; proportion;
mediator, intermediary; means, agency, instrumentality.
Medium, a. Middle, mean, middling, intermediate, medial,
mediocre, central.
Ant. Outer, extreme, distant, remote.
Medley. Mixture, jumble, miscellany, potpourri, hodge-podge;
tumult, confusion, litter, diversity, complexity.
Ant. Order, harmony, simplicity; arrangement, classification,
assortment, disposition, grouping.
Meed. Merit, reward, recompense; worth, desert; guerdon,
premium, prize, award, remuneration; gift, present.
Ant. Penalty, punishment, brand, stigma, amercement.
Meek. Submissive, yielding, unassuming, gentle; mild, patient,
humble; lowly, modest.
Ant. Bold, arrogant, proud, self-assertive, irritable,
presumptuous, high-spirited.
Meet, v. Join; confront, encounter; be present; perceive,
experience, suffer; equal, satisfy; assemble, congregate; harmonize,
agree, unite; fulfil, comply, gratify, answer.
Ant. Miss, escape, elude; be absent; avoid, separate, vary,
diverge, decline, part, disagree; disappoint, fall short, fail.
Meet, a. Suitable, fit, proper, appropriate, qualified, convenient.
Ant. Inappropriate, unfit, inconvenient, unsuited, improper.
Meeting. Conference, assembly, company, convention,
congregation, junction, union, confluence; interview, encounter;
assemblage, concourse, gathering.
Melancholy, n. Melancholia; depression, dejection, brooding,
gloominess.
Ant. Happiness, gladness, sanity, merriment, mirth, cheer,
hopefulness.
Melancholy, a. Sad, dispirited, low-spirited, down-hearted,
unhappy, hypochondriac, heavy, doleful, afflictive; dejected,
depressed, disconsolate, gloomy, sorrowful, moody, desponding;
grave, somber, dark.
Ant. Happy, cheerful, gladsome, sprightly, lively, merry,
mirthful, blithesome, gleeful.
Mellifluous. Smooth, honeyed, sweet, mellow, euphonious,
silvery, dulcet.
Ant. Raucous, hoarse, discordant, harsh, rough, broken,
abrupt.
Mellow. Ripe, soft, tender; subdued, delicate; genial, jovial.
Ant. Unripe, hard, green, acid, sour; harsh, glaring;
discordant.
Melodious. Musical, agreeable, harmonious, dulcet, sweet,
tuneful, rhythmical, concordant, mellifluous.
Ant. Discordant, harsh, dissonant, raucous, jarring,
inharmonious.
Melody. Harmony, rhythm, air, tune, music, song, sweetness of
sound, descant, theme, unison, symphony.
Ant. Discord, jarring, dissonance, harshness, discordance.
Melt. Liquefy, fuse, thaw, mollify, soften; be dissipated, run, blend,
flow, dissolve.
Ant. Harden, combine, consolidate, unite, crystallize.
Member. Organ, limb; constituent, part; clause, phrase; essential;
portion, component.
Ant. Whole, body, entirety, aggregate, sum, totality,
community, society, association, organization, constitution.
Memoir. Memorial, biography, record, narrative, chronicle,
register.
Memorable. Important, illustrious, remarkable, extraordinary,
signal, distinguished, famous, celebrated, great, conspicuous,
prominent.
Ant. Ordinary, trivial, commonplace, insignificant, mediocre.
Memorial. Monument, record, memorandum, memento, souvenir.
Ant. Silence, oblivion; non-observance; erasure.
Memory. Remembrance, recollection, reminiscence; fame,
renown, reputation; monument; retrospection, retrospect;
perpetuation, retention.
Ant. Oblivion, oversight, unmindfulness, obliviousness,
forgetfulness.
Menace, n. Threat, evil intention, denunciation, threatening.
Ant. Good will, benediction, blessing, kindness; protection.
Mend. Help, amend, emend, correct, rectify; repair, improve,
reform, better, restore, ameliorate.
Ant. Impair, damage, spoil, corrupt; harm, deteriorate,
pervert.
Mendacity. Lying, deceit, falsehood, untruth, duplicity, lie,
untruthfulness, deception; prevarication.
Ant. Truth, honesty, rectitude, uprightness, veracity, accuracy,
exactness.
Menial. Servile, mean; domestic; dependent, attendant.
Ant. Noble, independent, autocratic, supreme, superior.
Mental. Intellectual, spiritual, metaphysical, subjective,
psychological, psychical, intelligent.
Ant. Physical, corporeal, objective, bodily.
Mention, n. Reference, allusion, notice, remembrance, hint,
communication, observation, declaration.
Ant. Omission, silence, suppression, forgetfulness, neglect.
Mention, v. Speak of, notice, announce, observe, remark, hint,
declare, tell, state, report, disclose, allude to, name, refer to.
Ant. Suppress, omit, be silent about, forget, silence, drop,
neglect, disregard, slight.
Mercantile. Commercial, traffic, business; wholesale, retail;
interchangeable, marketable.
Ant. Professional; unmercantile, unmarketable, stagnant,
unprofitable.
Mercenary. Paid, hired, hireling, venal; greedy, sordid, avaricious,
selfish.
Ant. Generous, unselfish, lavish, prodigal, liberal,
philanthropic, benevolent.
Merchandise. Wares, commodities, goods; trade, traffic,
commerce; stock.
Merchant. Trader, shopkeeper, dealer, tradesman, trafficker;
importer.
Ant. Shopman, salesman, retailer, pedler, huckster.
Merciful. Compassionate, tender, humane, gracious, kind, mild,
clement, benignant, lenient, pitiful, forgiving; tender-hearted.
Ant. Remorseless, pitiless, inexorable, unrelenting, severe,
cruel, hard, illiberal.
Mercy. Compassion, grace, favor, helpfulness, clemency,
forbearance, tenderness, forgiveness, gentleness, pardon, blessing,
pity, kindness, mildness, lenity, benevolence, benignity, lenience,
leniency.
Ant. Harshness, rigor, severity, sternness, penalty, justice,
vengeance, revenge, punishment, hardness, cruelty, implacability,
ruthlessness, inhumanity, brutality, exaction.
Mere. Unmixed, pure, absolute, unqualified, simple, bare,
unaffected; unadulterated.
Ant. Compound, mixed, impure, blended, combined,
adulterated.
Meridian, n. Midday, noon, zenith, height, culmination, summit,
apex, pinnacle, acme.
Ant. Midnight, antipodes, depth, profundity, base, depression,
nadir.
Merit, n. Desert, worth, excellence, reward, approbation;
worthiness, credit, goodness.
Ant. Worthlessness, error, unworthiness, demerit, weakness,
imperfection, fault.
Merry. Gay, jovial, sportive; cheerful, happy; blithe, lively,
sprightly, vivacious, mirthful, gleeful, joyous, jocund, hilarious.
Ant. Gloomy, sad, disconsolate, dismal, moody, dejected.
Message. Notice, word, communication, missive, letter,
intimation.
Ant. Interception, silence, non-communication, neglect.
Messenger. Carrier, harbinger, intelligencer, courier, forerunner,
herald, precursor.
Metaphysical. Mental, intellectual, psychological, abstract,
general, ideal, psychical, subjective, rational, abstruse, conceptual.
Ant. Physical, substantial, physiological, material, practical,
objective, palpable, external.
Method. Order, system, rule, way, manner, mode, course,
arrangement, process, means, regularity.
Ant. Disorder, experimentation, guesswork, conjecture,
attempt, empiricism.
Midst. Middle, center, heart; thick; press; burden.
Ant. Circumference, rim, surface, border, outside, perimeter.
Mien. Aspect, manner, bearing, look, carriage, deportment,
appearance.
Ant. Character, disposition, nature, constitution, personality.
Might. Force, energy, power, means, resources; strength, capacity,
ability.
Ant. Weakness, feebleness, infirmity, impotence; inability,
inefficiency, incapability; want, lack.
Mild. Gentle, pleasant, clement, kind, soft, bland; moderate, placid,
tender, genial, meek.
Ant. Harsh, fierce, savage, rough, wild, violent, merciless,
severe.
Mind. Understanding, intellect, soul; opinion, judgment, belief;
choice, inclination, liking, intent, will; courage, spirit;
remembrance, memory, recollection; reason, brain, sense,
consciousness, disposition, intelligence, thought, instinct.
Ant. Body, matter, brute force, brawn, limbs, material
substance, members; feelings, emotions, heart, affections,
sensibilities; conduct; forgetfulness, obliviousness.
Mindful. Regardful, attentive, heedful, observant, thoughtful,
careful.
Ant. Inattentive, regardless, careless, forgetful, oblivious,
absent-minded.
Mingle. Combine, join, confuse, compound, mix; unite, associate;
intermarry; blend, amalgamate.
Ant. Separate, sever, segregate, dissolve, sift, sort, classify,
analyze.
Minister, n. Delegate, official, ambassador; clergyman, priest,
parson, ecclesiastic, preacher, divine, vicar, curate; envoy.
Ant. Monarch, master, superior, principal; layman;
government.
Minor, a. Inferior, less important, smaller, less, junior,
unimportant, younger.
Ant. Major, greater, older, senior, elder, main, important.
Minute. Small, tiny, slender, diminutive, slight, little; precise,
particular, detailed, critical, circumstantial, exact, fine,
comminuted, specific; inconsiderable; microscopic.
Ant. Monstrous, great, enormous, grand, huge; general,
abstract, broad, comprehensive; inexact, superficial.
Miraculous. Supernatural, super-physical; wonderful, awesome.
Ant. Natural, ordinary, scientific.
Mis-. A prefix used in the sense of amiss, wrong, ill. Words to
which this prefix but adds this meaning are omitted here, and their
synonyms and antonyms may usually be readily found by reference
to the root words.
Misanthropy. Cynicism, hatred, egoism.
Ant. Philanthropy, benevolence, altruism, humanitarianism.
Miscellany. Mass, mixture, collection, medley, jumble, variety,
hodge-podge, diversity.
Ant. Selection, system, arrangement, order, group, assortment,
classification.
Mischief. Damage, harm, hurt, injury, detriment, evil, ill; mishap,
trouble.
Ant. Benefit, good, blessing, profit, gratification, compensation,
favor.
Miser. Niggard, skinflint, curmudgeon, churl.
Ant. Spendthrift, profligate.
Miserable. Abject, forlorn, pitiable, wretched, mean; worthless,
despicable, contemptible; unfortunate, unlucky.
Ant. Comfortable, happy, respectable, contented, cheerful, easy.
Misery. Unhappiness, wretchedness, woe; calamity, disaster,
misfortune.
Ant. Happiness, contentment, ease, comfort, pleasure,
enjoyment.
Misfortune. Adversity, failure, ill luck, hardship, harm, ill,
affliction, calamity, blow, disaster, disappointment, trial,
tribulation, sorrow, ruin, distress, stroke, misery, reverse,
mischance, visitation, chastening, trouble, chastisement,
misadventure, bereavement, mishap.
Ant. Consolation, blessing, boon, happiness, joy, prosperity,
relief, triumph, success, comfort, good fortune, gratification, good
luck, pleasure.
Mission. Message, errand, commission, deputation; embassy;
ministry, legation; trust, office.
Ant. Assumption, usurpation, self-appointment; faithlessness,
betrayal.
Mist. Fog, vapor; obscuration, cloudiness, perplexity,
bewilderment, haze.
Ant. Clarity, brightness; perspicuity, revelation, clearness,
discernment, insight, understanding; lucidity.
Mob. Rabble, masses, dregs of the people, the vulgar, populace,
crowd, canaille, lower classes.
Ant. Élite, aristocracy, nobility, nobles, patricians.
Mobile. Movable, excitable, inconstant, changeable, fickle;
variable, ductile, sensitive.
Ant. Immovable, firm, set, steady, unvarying, unchangeable,
inexorable.
Model. Mold, copy, design, example, image, imitation, standard,
type, representation, pattern, prototype, facsimile, original,
archetype; norm.
Ant. Imitation; work, production, execution; accomplishment.
Moderate, a. Sparing, temperate, frugal, calm, mild; limited,
restrained, reasonable; dispassionate, controlled; abstinent, sober;
austere, ascetic.
Ant. Immoderate, intemperate, luxurious, excessive,
extravagant.
Modern. New, novel, modish, fashionable, present, late, extant,
recent.
Ant. Past, ancient, antiquated, old, antique, obsolete, former.
Modesty. Humility, lowliness, humbleness, meekness, shyness,
reserve, coldness, bashfulness, backwardness, constraint, timidity,
unobtrusiveness, coyness.
Ant. Frankness, freedom, impudence, indiscretion, self-conceit,
sauciness, abandon, arrogance, confidence, egoism, assumption,
assurance, boldness, forwardness, haughtiness, loquacity,
pertness, pride, vanity, self-sufficiency, openness, effrontery.
Moment. Instant, twinkling, consequence, weight, consideration,
force, value, signification, avail; second, trice.
Ant. Age, period, decade, century, generation; insignificance,
unimportance, triviality.
Monarch. Ruler, sovereign; king, prince, emperor, queen.
Ant. Subject, peer, plebes.
Money. Coin, cash, currency, gold, funds, property, specie, silver,
bills, bullion, notes, capital.
Monopoly. Exclusiveness, possession, privilege, appropriation,
engrossment, preëmption.
Ant. Community, partnership, competition, free trade;
participation, sharing; communism; socialism.
Monotonous. Unvarying, uniform, wearisome, dull, tedious,
same, unison, humdrum, undiversified; similar, like.
Ant. Varied, changed, diversified; harmonic; lively; divergent,
variant.
Monster. Prodigy, enormity, marvel, portent; monstrosity,
wonder; demon, fiend, dragon, sphinx, colossus, leviathan; ogre.
Ant. Pigmy, dwarf, elf; angel, beauty, cherub.
Monstrous. Abnormal, extraordinary, prodigious, portentous,
marvelous, unnatural; vast, immense, colossal, stupendous;
shocking, horrible, hateful, terrible, hideous.
Ant. Beautiful, small, reasonable, little, shapely, regular, fair,
pretty, comely; ordinary, familiar, natural; charming, lovely.
Moral, a. Dutiful, right, virtuous, just, worthy, ethical; intellectual,
spiritual, religious, pious, righteous, ideal.
Ant. Immoral, wrong, sinful, unjust, unworthy, vicious, gross;
irreligious, impious, sensual; physical, bodily, carnal.
Moreover. Besides, further, in addition; also, likewise, in addition
to.
Ant. Finally, lastly.
Morose. Gruff, gloomy, crusty, crabbed, acrimonious, severe,
snappish, sullen, surly, churlish, dogged, ill-humored, ill-natured,
sulky.
Ant. Bland, gentle, benignant, good-natured, kind, loving,
pleasant, sympathetic, genial, amiable, friendly, tender,
indulgent, complaisant, mild.
Mortal. Deathlike; deadly, destructive, poisonous; vulnerable,
vital; human, perishable, ephemeral, transient, transitory.
Ant. Immortal, undying, everlasting, eternal, divine, celestial,
life-giving, perennial.
Motherly. Maternal, motherlike, parental; kind, loving,
affectionate.
Ant. Paternal, fatherlike, fatherly; harsh, unloving, unkind,
hateful.
Motion. Movement, change, action, act, passage, move, process,
transit, transition.
Ant. Quiescence, quiet, rest, repose, stillness, immobility.
Motive. Incentive, incitement, inducement, reason, spur, stimulus,
cause; object, purpose; argument, conviction; impulse, prompting.
Ant. Deed, achievement, execution, action, attempt, project;
deflector, preventive, dissuasion, deterrent.
Mourn. Lament, grieve, regret, rue, bewail, sorrow.
Ant. Exult, joy, rejoice, be joyful, triumph, make merry.
Mournful. Lugubrious, heavy, sad, sorrowful, grievous,
calamitous.
Ant. Joyful, jubilant, gladsome, cheerful, happy, pleasant,
joyous.
Move. Stir, agitate, trouble, affect, persuade, actuate, impel,
prompt, instigate, incite, offer, induce.
Ant. Stop, stay, arrest, prevent, deter; calm, appease, deflect.
Movement. Motion; compulsion, stimulation, incitement,
agitation, arousing, instigation.
Ant. Stoppage, stay, pause, calm, quiet.
Much. Great; long; considerable; abundant; far; ample, plenteous.
Ant. Little, small, scarce, few, scanty, near; narrow.
Multiplication. Teeming, multiplicity, multitude, increase,
plurality, reproduction, augmentation, swarming,
multifariousness, multitudinousness.
Ant. Diminution, division, subtraction, reduction; extinction;
rarity, scantiness; unity, singularity.
Multitude. Throng, crowd, assembly, assemblage, commonalty,
swarm, populace; host, rabble, mob, concourse.
Ant. Individual, solitude; aristocracy; oligarchy; scantiness,
paucity, scarcity.
Mundane. Worldly, terrestrial, earthly; sublunary; secular,
temporal.
Ant. Unworldly, spiritual, celestial, eternal, supramundane,
stellar, solar, lunar.
Munificent. Bounteous, bountiful, liberal, generous; beneficent,
free, lavish, extravagant.
Ant. Small, niggardly, saving, sparing, mean, close.
Musical. Melodious, harmonious, tuneful, symphonious,
mellifluous, rhythmical.
Ant. Discordant, inharmonious, harsh, raucous, unmelodious.
Mute. Silent, dumb, speechless; voiceless; still, unpronounced;
unresponsive; taciturn.
Ant. Talkative, chattering, garrulous, vocal, speaking,
loquacious, loud, noisy.
Mutual. Common, correlative, reciprocal, joint, interchangeable.
Ant. Detached, distinct, disunited, separate, severed, sundered,
unshared, unreciprocated, unrequited, disconnected.
Mysterious. Abstruse, enigmatical, dark, mystical, occult, obscure,
secret, transcendental, unknown, unfathomable, mystic, hidden,
inexplicable, inscrutable, cabalistic, incomprehensible, recondite.
Ant. Clear, plain, apparent, manifest, bright, light, explainable,
simple, comprehensible, obvious, easy, revealed, understood.
Mystic. Unknowable, obscure, mysterious; allegorical, enigmatical;
transcendental; cabalistic, symbolical.
Ant. Familiar, simple, ordinary, commonplace, obvious, plain.

Historicizing Life Writing and Egodocuments in Early Modern Europe James R Farr Full Chapter PDF

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Historicizing Life-Writing and

Egodocuments in Early Modern Europe

Historicizing Life Writing And Egodocuments In Early

Life and Death in Early Modern Philosophy 1st Edition

The Oxford History of Life-Writing, Volume 2: Early

Prophecy, Madness, and Holy War in Early Modern Europe

Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern

The Dialectics of Orientalism in Early Modern Europe

Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early

Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe

ISBN 978-3-030-82482-2 ISBN 978-3-030-82483-9 (eBook)

Cover illustration: Yogi Black/Alamy Stock Photo

1 Introduction: Historicizing Life-Writing

Part I The Self Theorized from a Historical Perspective

Part II Historical Approaches to Egodocuments:

6 Everard Nithard’s Memorias: The Jesuits Confessor’s

Part III Pushing the Limits of Life-Writing with a Wider

James S. Amelang (b. Louisville KY 1952) has recently retired from

Improprieties and the Art of Being Conspicuous (Stanford University

Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Council of Learned Soci-

John Jeffries Martin is a Professor of History at Duke University. He

Mantova (2019). She edited and co-translated Adriana Cavarero’s Stately

Fig. 6.1 Alonso del Arco, (1635–1704), Cardinal Juan

Fig. 12.4 Charles Beaubrun (1604–1692) and Henri Beaubrun

Fig. 12.13c John Selden, Titles of Honor (1631), p. 412. STC

Map 11.1 Map of Europe, c. 1730 (Created by Isabelle Lewis) 255

Introduction: Historicizing Life-Writing

James R. Farr and Guido Ruggiero

In The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), Jacob Burckhardt

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Scholars in pursuit of the self have found personal narratives, usually

and historians have refined their approaches to these kinds of sources.

construction of selfhood and identity.5 Eakin suggests, in fact, that

Greenblatt, taking his analysis back to the Tudor period in Renaissance

But perhaps the most radical reformulation of the ideas surrounding a

Part Two of this volume—“Historical Approaches to Egodocuments:

and 1918, an inventory whose ready accessibility has already stimulated a

by its foremost representative) is laid over that of individuals, including

archives), significantly enlarge the number of egodocuments that we have

life-writing, egodocuments, biography, and autobiography, each devel-

23 (1994); Jerome Bruner, “Self-Making Narratives,” in Autobio-

The Self Theorized from a Historical

Montaigne’s Elusive Self: An Essay

John Jeffries Martin

For many years, a copy of Donald Frame’s The Complete Essays of

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 19

this selva oscura, my more youthful certainties about the meaning of

of himself but also of the self more generally.1 Attention to Montaigne’s

such a thing as a transcendent identity. Social pressures did play a role

“I study myself more than any other subject – this is my metaphysics,

order and without purpose, that, in order to contemplate their absur-

I tell of him, and represent a particular one, quite poorly formed….Now

In observing himself, Montaigne is struck above all by his variability, his

The Latin language is quite natural to me. I understand it better than

The sequential acquisition of language over the course of Montaigne’s

of the complexity of identity. There are multiple layers in the makeup of

In favor of the Huguenots, who denounce our practice of auricular and

In a fundamental sense, then, Montaigne’s Essais, despite their

into a claim of self-knowledge and of reform. Either this would result in

relational self provide an adequate account. Montaigne’s self may have

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