ABSTRACT
In the early modern period a growing number of people put pen to paper (or parchment) to write something down. The motives for picking up a pen were extraordinarily various – writing might be necessary to conduct the business of the State (Chapter 1); to record the proceedings of the judicial system (Chapter 2); to enact or encourage religious reforms (Chapter 3); to entertain, argue, educate, enlighten or make a profit (Chapter 4); or simply as a creative act of the imagination (Chapter 5). In this chapter I am not concerned with any of these institutional, professional or corporate acts of writing, but with what might be thought of as more ‘ordinary’ or ‘everyday’ forms of writing and the personal documents that such writing produced. These personal documents came in all shapes and forms, but they shared some common characteristics: they were seemingly undertaken by an individual, were often related to a person’s life, were not solely written in a professional capacity, or had a particular significance or importance to a particular person, but most importantly they captured the subjective side of a person’s experience. In practice it is of course hard to distinguish between institutional documents (which often contained personal information) and personal ones (which are not always as subjective as they appear). However, by way of example in this chapter I will focus on the two most common types of ‘personal’ material: correspondence and diaries.
