Women's Life Writing in Early Modern Scotland: Writing the Evangelical Self, c. 1670-c. 1730 (review)

2004 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 423-425
Author(s):  
Jane Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Life Writing

scholarly journals Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen's Life Writing

Prose Studies ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-308
Author(s):  
Natasha Simonova
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
The Self

Recording the History of Secret Thoughts in Early Modern France

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Warren Boutcher
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Early Modern France ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Modern France ◽  
History Of ◽  
Personal Registers

Chapter 2.5 begins with Pierre Huet’s early eighteenth-century description of the school of Montaigne, which he says has been flourishing for more than a century. He denounces the Essais as ‘the breviary of urbane loafers and ignorant pseudointellectuals’, of undisciplined, over-free literates who do not want to pursue proper scholarship and knowledge. The chapter goes on to offer two further case-studies of the life-writing of such free literates in early modern France (Jean Maillefer and Pierre de L’Estoile), as well as a coda on Pierre Coste and John Locke. Both read Montaigne’s work while writing manuscript journals to domestic and private ends; both combined reading and writing in books with the keeping and reviewing of personal records. L’Estoile reveals the significance of Montaigne’s references to the Essais as a registre––both institutional and personal registers were ubiquitous in this period.

The School of Montaigne in Early Modern Europe

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Warren Boutcher
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Book Of Nature ◽  
Modern Europe

This major two-volume study offers an interdisciplinary analysis of Montaigne’s Essais and their fortunes in early modern Europe and the modern Western university. Volume 1 focuses on contexts from within Montaigne’s own milieu, and on the ways in which his book made him a patron-author or instant classic in the eyes of his editor Marie de Gournay and his promoter Justus Lipsius. Volume 2 focuses on the reader-writers across Europe who used the Essais to make their own works, from corrected editions and translations in print, to life-writing and personal records in manuscript. The two volumes work together to offer a new picture of the book’s significance in literary and intellectual history. The school of Montaigne potentially included everyone in early modern Europe with occasion and means to read and write for themselves and for their friends and family, unconstrained by an official function or scholastic institution. The Essais were shaped by the post-Reformation battle to regulate the educated individual’s judgement in reading and acting upon the two books bequeathed by God to man. The book of scriptures and the book of nature were becoming more accessible through print and manuscript cultures. But at the same time that access was being mediated more intensively by teachers such as clerics and humanists, by censors and institutions, by learned authors of past and present, and by commentaries and glosses upon those authors. Montaigne enfranchised the unofficial reader-writer with liberties of judgement offered and taken in the specific historical conditions of his era.

scholarly journals Life Writing “from Below” in Europe: Authors, Archives, Avenues, Arenas

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. LWFB10-LWFB48
Author(s):  
T. G. Ashplant
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Public ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Individual Potential ◽  
The Public Sphere

Drawing on a large body of scholarship from the last forty years, this article offers an overview of the diverse forms of life writing “from below” (by authors from low down in a class or status hierarchy) in Europe since the early modern period (including autobiographies, diaries, letters, as well as transcripts of oral testimonies); and the varied and developing national traditions of collecting and archiving which have developed since the mid-twentieth century. It locates such writing within a field of force between an exteriority pole constituted by the state (or by organisations of civil society, or informal community pressures) which compel or otherwise elicit life writings from below, and an interiority pole of the impulse of someone hitherto excluded to narrate their life in some public sphere; and examines diverse ways (state compulsion or solicitation; citizen engagement, challenge or resistance) in which these pressures give rise to the production of texts. It identifies the roles of intermediaries within civil society (patrons, sponsors, commercial publishers, collaborators) as links between individual (potential) authors and the public sphere.

scholarly journals Childhood and Loss in Early Modern Life Writing

Parergon ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharine Hodgkin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Modern Life
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