What evidence can historians use to argue that a sense of self and individuality developed in early modern Europe?
This class considers the notion of the self. In particular we will focus on the concept of the self-aware individual and his/her representations.
A variety of ways of representing the self will be discussed, such as autobiography, portraiture, literary texts, diaries and letters.
Optional reading:
John Jeffries Martin, “Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: the Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe”, American Historical Review 102.5 (1997), 1308-42.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, 1989)
Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 2005)
Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual, 1050-1200 (Toronto, 1972)
Erving Goffmann, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (Edinburgh, 1956)
Shearer West, Portraiture (Oxford, 2004)
Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (London, 1990)
John Berger, ‘The Changing View of Man in the Portrait’ in The Look of Things (New York, 1974), pp. 35-41
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London, 1980)
Philippe Lejeune, On autobiography (Minneapolis, 1988)
James Olney, Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing (Chicago and London, 1998)
Karl Joachim Weintraub, The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography (Chicago and London, 1978)
Richard Sorabji, Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life and Death (Oxford, 2006)
Timothy J. Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (2003)
Roy Porter (ed.), Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London, 1997)
