explained by the rise of a new individualism in the Enlightenment? It can safely be assumed that she had not read Descartes’ Discourse on Method or John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. It will be necessary to take the long way around and tell the larger story of the rise of individualism if the significance of Margaret Austin’s experience is to be appreciated. The rise of individualism: the Renaissance : The nineteenth-century cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt established what has been the standard account of the rise of individualism in the Renaissance, sharply contrasting the medieval and modern sense of self-identity: In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness – that which was turned within as that which was turned without – lay dreaming or half

doi:10.4324/9780203166505-40

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explained by the rise of a new individualism in the Enlightenment? It can safely be assumed that she had not read Descartes’ Discourse on Method or John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. It will be necessary to take the long way around and tell the larger story of the rise of individualism if the significance of Margaret Austin’s experience is to be appreciated. The rise of individualism: the Renaissance

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ABSTRACT

Both Burckhardt and Gusdorf, then, would say that there was something novel about the way in which Margaret Austin wrote a personal narrative of her religious experience. They would both say that this was all but unthinkable before the Renaissance or outside western civilization. The Burckhardtian tradition has, however, been criticized in the last 30 years both for specific historical claims and for its grand narrative of the ‘ascent of man’. Peter Burke, for example, raises three problems. Geographically, there are Japanese autobiographies from the eleventh century and Chinese portraiture from the seventeenth century that call into question the uniqueness of self-consciousness as something peculiarly western. Sociologically, the tiny minority of literate, upper-class males, usually Italian, that is drawn upon to tell the standard story of the rise of individualism raises the question of how far this story may be applied to lower orders of society or to women. And, chronologically, there is evidence of individualism in the Middle Ages, especially from the twelfth century onwards, just as there is also evidence of identity shaped by kinship, guild and city in the early modern period.13