ABSTRACT
This most unremarkable of diary entries – a brief account by Ralph Josselin of catching a cold on his way to Cranham – provides a way into some features that fuel our study of early modern English autobiography. Firstly, the words, ‘cheerfulnes’ and ‘content’, very commonly used terms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and familiar too in our own lexicon, are related to, but distinct from, the post-Rousseau vocabulary of interiority. The Oxford English Dictionary finds the earliest usage of the word ‘feelings’, construed as the ‘tender or sensitive side of one’s nature’, in 1771, while for ‘emotional’ (‘liable to any emotion’) the compilers find no record before 1857. ‘Egotist’ and ‘egotism’ it cites from 1714, ‘self-control’ from 1711, ‘self-criticism’ from 1857, ‘self-effacing’ from 1902, and ‘self-image’ from 1939. ‘Devastate’, a back-formation, is claimed as a first for 1638, though it was not in common parlance until the nineteenth century. It is clear, then, from Josselin’s ‘cheerfulnes’, ‘content’, ‘desire’ and ‘affliction’ – all common enough in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century English – that people in the early modern period did not have a detailed language for experiencing, and describing, individuality as we know it, although the OED does cite several words – such as ‘touchy’ (1605), ‘lonely’ (1607), ‘lonesome’ (1647), and ‘emotion’ in the sense of strong feeling (1660)2 – as entering English parlance during the seventeenth century. The term ‘autobiography’, as James Treadwell notes, did not enter the English lexicon until 1797.3 In recent decades much debate has circulated concerning the nature, or extent, of agency and autonomy granted to people who lived four centuries ago. Lori Humphrey Newcomb observes the ‘particular and contingent histories’ that compel literary evaluations to be reliant on ‘ingeniously interpre[ted] evidence’4, while Stephen Greenblatt has turned to psychonalysis to provide a negatively-aligned frame for what we can know. In seventeenth-century culture, he argues, ‘proprietary rights to the self’ were as yet not established, and people were identified by their social roles and their relationship to the community. Identity was conferred by rights to property rather than agency as we understand the word in post-Enlightenment terms.5 In counterpoint (as distinct from opposition) to this,
Karen Worley Pirnie agrees with Mary Beth Rose that individuality and privacy were indeed gaining public validity6, a suggestion that Peter Goodall endorses in his analysis of the library or study as a place for contemplation that encouraged private self-reflection.7 And the broader impact of expanding geographical horizons also shifted the boundaries of individual sensibilities, as Helen Wilcox reminds us:
In an energetically colonial period, the concept of ownership and self-possession is not unrelated to the discovery and claiming of new worlds; the contemplation and enunciation of individual human personalities constituted voyages of exploration and conquest, too. As Sir Thomas Browne tellingly wrote in his Religio Medici (1643), “The World that I regard is my selfe”.8
