The Oxford History of Life Writing: Volume 2. Early Modern

Alan Stewart

Oxford History of Life-Writing

The first survey of early modern life-writing as a whole including biographies, autobiographies, and diaries.
Features a mix of familiar names including Samuel Pepys, John Aubrey, Thomas More, and Izaak Walton and lesser-known and intriguing figures.
Shows how new forms began to challenge established classical and medieval models.
Explores how the sixteenth-century English Reformation and the seventeenth-century Civil Wars changed life-writing.
Based on original archival research that brings readers into contact with the raw manuscript materials of early modern life-writing.

The Oxford History of Life Writing: Volume 2. Early Modern

Alan Stewart

Oxford History of Life-Writing

Description

The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume2. Early Modern explores life-writing in England between 1500 and 1700, and argues that this was a period which saw remarkable innovations in biography, autobiography, and diary-keeping that laid the foundations for our modern life-writing.

The challenges wrought by the upheavals and the sixteenth-century English Reformation and seventeenth-century Civil Wars moulded British and early American life-writing in unique and lasting ways. While classical and medieval models continued to exercise considerable influence, new forms began to challenge them. The English Reformation banished the saints' lives that dominated the writings of medieval Catholicism, only to replace them with new lives of Protestant martyrs. Novel forms of self-accounting came into existence: from the daily moral self-accounting dictated by strands of Calvinism, to the daily financial self-accounting modelled on the new double-entry book-keeping. This volume shows how the most ostensibly private journals were circulated to build godly communities; how women found new modes of recording and understanding their disrupted lives; how men started to compartmentalize their lives for public and private consumption. The volume doesn't intend to present a strict chronological progression from the medieval to the modern, nor to suggest the triumphant rise of the fact-based historical biography. Instead, it portrays early modern England as a site of multiple, sometimes conflicting possibilities for life-writing, all of which have something to teach us about how the period understood both the concept of a 'life' and what it mean to 'write' a life.

The Oxford History of Life Writing: Volume 2. Early Modern

Alan Stewart

Oxford History of Life-Writing

Introduction
1. The dangerous lives of Sir Thomas More
2. The reformed lives of John Bale
3. John Foxe's lives of the saints
4. Thomas Whythorne's life in songs and sonnets
5. The memorials of William Lambe
6. The receipts and expenses of Richard Stonley
7. Richard Rogers's course of examination
8. The Christian life and godly death of Katherine Brettergh
9. The revised lives of Tobie Matthew
10. The familial lives of Martha Moulsworth and Constance Lucy
11. The collected lives of Samuel Clarke
12. Izaak Walton's lives and works
13. John Aubrey's minutes of lives
14. Samuel Pepys's life in shorthand
15. The dangerous lives of Thomas Dangerfield
Notes
Bibliography

The Oxford History of Life Writing: Volume 2. Early Modern

Alan Stewart

Oxford History of Life-Writing

Author Information

Alan Stewart is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and International Director for the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters in London. He is the author of biographies of Francis Bacon (with Lisa Jardine), Philip Sidney, and James VI and I, and of Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (1997) and Shakespeare's Letters (2008). He is Assistant Director of the Oxford Francis Bacon, for which he edited volume 1, Bacon's early writings (2012). He has won awards from the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Folger Shakespeare Library, and in 2011-2012 was a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow.

The Oxford History of Life Writing: Volume 2. Early Modern

Alan Stewart

Oxford History of Life-Writing

Reviews and Awards

"Stewart assesses a vast range of primary material... shining a light on lesser-known historical figures who make fascinating contributions to the rich variety of life-writing. [...] Stewart's study presents a highly readableand richly researched account not just of lifewriting, but also of its reception. He provides an important reminder of the politics of authorship in an age when ownership of proscribed texts could lead to public execution." -- Times Literary Supplement

"Distinguished by its enormous erudition, analytical sharpness, humane observation, and poetic breadth, Stewart's history of early modern life writing deserves a wide and admiring audience." -- Andrea Walkden, CUNY, Renaissance Quarterly

"On all counts, this is a useful, thoroughly researched, relevant, and interesting to read book for scholars and history enthusiasts alike." -- Anna Faktorovich, Pensylvania Literary Journal