Autobiography in Early Modern England [Hardcover]

Explores life-writing forms - almanacs, financial accounts, commonplace books and parish registers - which emerged during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.By examining four different forms of writing - the almanac, the financial account, the commonplace book and the parish register - Adam Smyth explores the kinds of texts that sixteenth- or seventeenth-century individuals produced to register their life, in the absence of the later, dominant templates.By examining four different forms of writing - the almanac, the financial account, the commonplace book and the parish register - Adam Smyth explores the kinds of texts that sixteenth- or seventeenth-century individuals produced to register their life, in the absence of the later, dominant templates.How did individuals write about their lives before a modern tradition of diaries and autobiographies was established? Adam Smyth examines the kinds of texts that sixteenth or seventeenth-century individuals produced to register their life, in the absence of these later, dominant templates. The book explores how readers responded to, and improvised with, four forms  the almanac, the financial account, the commonplace book and the parish register  to create written records of their lives. Early modern autobiography took place across these varied forms, often through a lengthy process of transmission and revision of written documents. This book brings a dynamic, surprising culture of life-writing to light for the first time, and will be of interest to anyone studying autobiography or early modern literature.Acknowledgements; Note on references; Introduction; 1. Almanacs and annotators; 2. Financial accounting; 3. Commonplace book lives: 'a very applicative story'; 4. Entries and exits: finding life in parish registers; Conclusion.Smyths arguments are persuasive, blending methods from both history and literary criticism to produce an elegantly written, meticulously research[ed] book. It will be essential reading for lÃ4