Rewriting the Self

Histories from the Middle Ages to the Present

Roy Porter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134764921
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Rewriting the Self is an exploration of ideas of the self in the western cultural tradition from the Renaissance to the Present. The contributors analyse differing religious, philosophical, psychological, political, psychoanalytical and literary models of personal identity. They examine these models from a number of viewpoints, including the history of ideas, contemporary gender politics, and post-modernist literary theory.
Rewriting the Self offers a challenge to the received version of the 'ascent of western man'. Lively and controversial, the book broaches big questions in an accessible way.
Rewriting the Self arises from a seminar series held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. The contributors include prominent academics from a range of disciplines.

Part I

RENAISSANCE AND EARLY MODERN

1

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE SELF FROM PETRARCH TO DESCARTES
Peter Burke

Cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. Philosophers have often pointed out that this argument of Descartes, in his Discourse on Method (1637), is a circular one, since the ‘I’ of ‘I think’ assumes exactly what the writer is trying to prove. From the point of view of a cultural historian, however, this passage remains important as a celebrated affirmation of the importance and the unity of the self.

It is often claimed that this modern idea of the self goes back to the Renaissance, in the sense of the period of European cultural history which stretches from Petrarch to Descartes, from the early fourteenth century (at least in the case of Italy) to the early seventeenth. If this chapter were being written in the age of Jacob Burckhardt, its main thesis would be simple and clear. When he published his essay on The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy in 1860, the great Swiss cultural historian was confident that a central development in Italian culture in that period was what he called ‘individualism’ or ‘the discovery of man’.

Burckhardt’s contrast between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was a dramatic one. In the Middle Ages, according to him, people were aware of themselves only as members of a group; in the Renaissance, on the other hand, ‘man became a spiritual individual and recognized himself as such’. The rise of self-awareness or subjectivity was reflected by the rise of autobiographies and portraits. In its concern with the individual self, according to Burckhardt, Italy was the first modern culture. Italy was a model for the rest of Europe as Europe would later be for the rest of the world.

However, all these statements are problematic, as historians have become aware in the last thirty years or so. Problematic from at least three points of view: geographical, sociological and chronological. In the first place, we cannot assume the uniqueness of the Western self without examining Japanese autobiographies, Chinese portraits and so on. I shall return to this problem at the end of this chapter. In the second place, there is the sociological problem: whose self? Burckhardt’s examples came from a tiny minority of Italians, generally upper-class males.

In the third place, Burckhardt’s contrast between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages was too sharp. On one side, he underestimated the importance of the preoccupation with the individual self in the Middle Ages, especially from the twelfth century onwards. On the other side, he exaggerated this preoccupation during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the Italy of this time there is no lack of evidence of identification with family, guild, faction or city. In different contexts, people saw themselves or presented themselves as Florentines (say), as Italians, as Christians, as males, as soldiers and so on. Identities were not single but multiple.

It is also necessary to raise the question whether changes in the sense of individual identity were connected with the cultural movement we call the Renaissance, or whether they simply happened at the same time. In certain cases, as we shall see, classical examples were taken as models, but some writers of personal documents were probably unaware that the Renaissance was taking place.

CONCEPTS OF THE SELF

In any case, the very concept of ‘the self is not as simple as it looks. Burckhardt was particularly concerned with self-consciousness and its expression in literature (biographies and autobiographies) and art (portraits and self-portraits). He assumed, as many people have done before and since, that these expressions of the self were transparent. However, this assumption has been undermined by many twentieth-century literary, historical and sociological studies. Their authors view the outward expressions of the self as so many facades and stress the strategies and conventions of ‘self-presentation’, ‘self-stylization’ and ‘impression management’. They are interested not only in the person but also in the ‘persona’, the mask which the individual wears in public, the role which he or she is playing.

More recently, these studies, of which Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is the most famous, have been undermined in their turn. The idea of self-presentation implies a fixed self operating behind the facade. By contrast, a cluster of recent books emphasize ‘self-fashioning’ (as Stephen Greenblatt puts it in a study of Renaissance England), or the ‘reconstruction’ or even the ‘invention’ of the self, which is now assumed, in the wake of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, to be a linguistic, cultural or social construct.

The ideas of self-consciousness, self-expression, self-presentation and self-fashioning do not exhaust the conceptual problems awaiting a historian of the Renaissance self, or better, of the variety of ‘Renaissance selves’. Self-knowledge, self-confidence, self-cultivation, self-examination and self-reliance also deserve to be considered. So does self-respect, an idea which was usually formulated in this period in terms of ‘honour’.

So too does self-control. According to the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, emotional instability was characteristic of Europeans in the late Middle Ages, a ‘perpetual oscillation between despair and distracted joy, between cruelty and pious tenderness’. Building on Huizinga’s foundation, the German sociologist Norbert Elias argued that the consolidation of the centralized state in the early modern period led to a consolidation of the self. Political stability led to psychological stability. Elias illustrated the trend to self-control in an unforgettable way with examples of increasingly strict table manners taken from ‘conduct books’, a popular literary genre in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and one to which Erasmus and other Renaissance humanists contributed.

If we are not to lose ourselves in this forest of concepts, we need to turn for orientation to the language used during the period itself. Renaissance humanists were much concerned with self-knowledge. ‘Know thyself’, they reiterated in different languages, gnothi seauton, nosce teipsum, erkenne Dich selbst and so on. As Sir John Davies put it in his poem Nosce teipsum (1599), ‘My self am centre of my circling thought/Only myself I study, learn and know.’

Equally important was the presentation of self to others. ‘Giving a good impression of oneself (dar buona impression di sé) was a central theme of one of the most famous books in Renaissance Italy, Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528). Around the year 1600, a number of European writers, including Francis Bacon, discussed the twin arts of simulation and dissimulation. There was also considerable interest in what was occasionally called ‘psychology’, especially in character-types and psychological disorders, notably melancholy (regularly discussed from Marsilio Ficino in the later fifteenth century to Robert Burton in the early seventeenth).

The uniqueness of the individual was also a concern at this time. According to Castiglione, ‘Master Unique’ (Messer Unico) was the nick-name of a poet at the court of Urbino. John Donne claimed that in his day ‘every man’ ‘thinks he has got to be a Phoenix’, in the sense that there ‘can be/None of that kind of which he is, but he’, while social roles such as ‘Prince, subject, father, son’ had been forgotten. The claim is remarkably similar to Burckhardt’s later remark that in the Middle Ages ‘man’ was only conscious of himself as a member of some general category, while in the Renaissance a sense of the individual developed.

‘Sincerity’ was another Renaissance concept, a word which came into regular use in English in the late sixteenth century, as the American critic Lionel Trilling pointed out. Shakespeare used the terms ‘sincerity’, ‘sincere’ and ‘sincerely’ thirteen times in his printed works (Sidney and Jonson used the terms twice each, while Milton, by contrast, used them forty-eight times in his prose works alone). The advice Polonius gives Laertes in Hamlet ‘to thine own self be true’ may have been a commonplace but it was a relatively new commonplace. What is more, the term ‘sincere’ was becoming a fashionable one in other languages during this period, notably Italian and French (Montaigne was one of the first recorded users). Like the literature on simulation and dissimulation, the rise of the new term suggests that people were becoming more aware of the difference between an inner and an outer self, a difference which was given its classic formulation by Descartes at the end of the period in his famous contrast between mind and body, unkindly described in our own day as the doctrine of ‘the ghost in the machine’.

As the examples cited above suggest, the sources for the study of Renaissance selves are manifold. Besides essays such as Montaigne’s, plays like Shakespeare’s, and dialogues such as Castiglione’s, there are biographies, autobiographies, diaries, travel journals, letters. This literary evidence may be supplemented by painted and sculpted portraits and self-portraits. In this chapter I shall examine a few of these sources of information about self-consciousness, looking especially at changes over the long term. The reader should try to bear in mind the fact that the same texts and artefacts have been viewed by different scholars as examples of self-expression, self-presentation or self-invention.

BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Biographies were not unknown in the Middle Ages. Lives of the saints were common, and lives of laymen were written from time to time. In the ninth century, a biography of the emperor Charlemagne was written by his chaplain Einhard. In the thirteenth century, the French nobleman Joinville wrote a biography of Louis IX of France. In the fifteenth century an anonymous follower of Bayard wrote the biography of his master, the knight ‘without fear and without reproach’.

However, the interest in biography had been much stronger in ancient Greece and Rome, especially in late antiquity. Plutarch wrote his parallel lives of famous Greeks and Romans at the beginning of the second century. Suetonius wrote his biographies of Roman emperors at about the same time, while Diogenes Laertius wrote his lives of philosophers in the third century.

These lives attracted much interest during the Renaissance and they inspired modern imitations, first in Italy and later elsewhere. Petrarch wrote the lives of a number of illustrious men on the model of Jerome’s De viris illustribus. His friend Boccaccio wrote lives of Dante and Petrarch on the model of the life of Virgil by the Roman critic Donatus. In the fifteenth century a Florentine bookseller, Vespasiano da Bisticci, wrote the lives of the famous men of his day (many of them his clients). In the sixteenth century, two famous collections of biographies were published: Paolo Giovio’s lives of princes and generals and Giorgio Vasari’s lives of Italian artists. It became increasingly common to provide famous books with an introductory biography of the author, as if his life was the key to the work.

Women too were the subjects of biographies. Boccaccio wrote the lives of more than a hundred illustrious women, from Eve to Queen Joanna of Naples, via Semiramis, Juno, Venus, Helen, Artemisia, Portia and Lucretia. Jacopo Filippo Foresti, an Augustinian hermit from Bergamo, published a collection of lives, On Certain Famous Women (1497), including the Renaissance scholars Isotta Nogarola and Cassandra Fedele. Vespasiano included the life of Alessandra de’ Bardi in his collection, comparing her to the ancient Roman matron Portia for her piety and courage.

Outside Italy, few biographies were written before the sixteenth century, but then the trickle turned into a flood. For example, a biography of Dürer was published in 1532, the first Northern European biography of an artist. A biography of Erasmus was published in 1540, only four years after his death. The French humanist Theodore Beza published a biography of his master Jean Calvin in 1564. In England, one thinks of William Roper and Nicholas Harpsfield on Thomas More, of George Cavendish on Cardinal Wolsey (all written in the 1550s), and of Fulke Greville on his friend Philip Sidney. The popularity of the French and English translations of Plutarch’s Lives is another sign of the interest in intimate biographical details. Plutarch was one of Montaigne’s favourite authors precisely because his biographies dealt with private as well as public affairs, with the inner as well as the outer life of his subjects.

The autobiography or what some historians call the ‘ego-document’ (a broader category including diaries, journals, memoirs and letters) is potentially at least even more revealing of the self. Before 1500, autobiographies and memoirs were relatively rare, despite a few famous examples such as Petrarch, the humanist pope Pius II, the pious Englishwoman Margery Kempe, and the French diplomat Philippe de Commynes.

It is obviously dangerous to argue from the rarity of ego-documents before 1500 that self-consciousness was undeveloped, since modern Western links between writing and self-examination are not universal. The kinds of text produced in a given culture are related not only to its central values but also to local assumptions about the uses of literacy (and we must not forget that only a minority of the population of Renaissance Europe was able to write).

When ego-documents exist, on the other hand, they are valuable testimonies to the kind of self-image current in a particular milieu, as two examples may suggest. Petrarch’s autobiography, the Secretum, takes the form of a dialogue between ‘Franciscus’ and ‘Augustinus’ and so bears witness to its author’s sense of a divided or fragmented self. Again, in Florence the tradition of memoranda (ricordanze) went back to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. These texts were not quite account-books, not quite diaries, not quite local chronicles, not quite family histories, but something of each of these. They illustrate a form of self-consciousness in which the boundaries between the individual, the family and the city were less sharp than they became centuries later.

After 1500, ego-documents became more common and more personal. In Italy one finds not only such famous examples as the autobiographies of the Florentine sculptor Benvenuto Cellini and the Milanese physician Girolamo Cardano, but also a host of minor figures including the apothecary Luca Landucci, the tailor Sebastiano Arditi and the carpenter Giambattista Casale.

Outside Italy, sixteenth-century examples of autobiography include the emperor Maximilian (who employed ghost-writers), St Teresa, St Ignatius, the French soldier Blaise de Monluc, the Swiss family Platter (which produced three texts in three successive generations), the German burgomaster Bartholomew Sastrow, and the English musician Thomas Whitehorne.

Why should the autobiographical habit have developed at this time? It might be argued that the city, which offers alternative ways of life, encourages a sense of individual choice. The sixteenth century was an age of urbanization. It was also an age of travel, and travel encourages self-consciousness by cutting off the individual from his or her community. A famous account of a visit to Brazil begins as follows: ‘I Hans Staden of Homberg in Hesse proposed, if God willed, to see the Indies, and with this intention I travelled from Bremen to Holland.’

The sixteenth century was also the first century in which print became part of everyday life. It was the age not only of the rise of the autobiography or journal but also of fictional narratives in the first-person story, such as the picaresque novel in Spain or the sonnet-sequences of Sidney, Shakespeare and others. These examples suggest the importance of the diffusion of printed models for the creation of a new or sharper sense of self, as well as for the breakdown of inhibitions about writing down the story of one’s life.

Why were specific texts produced? In the case of autobiography, the explanation is usually given in the first paragraph or so of the text (it is one of the conventions of the genre). They offer an interesting body of answers, which are worth taking seriously even if we do not take them literally. They range from the ‘modesty formula’, claiming that the text was produced at the request of someone else (often a son, as in the case of Thomas Platter and Sir James Melville, sometimes disciples, as in the case of Ignatius Loyola), to Cellini’s immodest assertion that ‘Every man who has done something worthwhile’—such as himself—‘should write an account of his life with his own hand’. In the case of biography, fame was again the spur or one of the spurs. Another purpose was to offer exemplars to the reader, or in the language of modern psychologists, ‘role models’ or ‘ego ideals’. The lives of the saints, for instance. Again, Antonio de Guevara’s Dial of Princes (Reloj de Principes) was a biography of Marcus Aurelius written in order for princes such as Charles V to regulate their conduct as if by a clock.

A variety of models and styles was available. There was the impersonal style, for instance, exemplified by the ‘commentaries’ of Pius II or Monluc or the English soldier Francis Vere (in the manner of Julius Caesar). A different form of impersonality can be found in the majority of ricordanze, listing births, marriages and deaths, noting prices, the weather, news which arrived in the city and so on. There was also a more personal, confessional style in the manner of St Augustine, whose example was followed by Petrarch, among others, and also by St Teresa, who began by remarking that ‘If I had not been so wicked, the possession of devout, god-fearing parents together with the favour of God’s grace, would have been enough to make me good.’ A secular form of the confessional model can be found in the diary of a young Florentine patrician Girolamo da Sommaia, narrating his sexual exploits to himself, recording them for safety’s sake in the Greek alphabet, and describing his ‘sweetness with Francisca’ (dolcetudine con Francisco), ‘sweetness of Isabella without paying’ (Dolcetudine di Isabella senza soldo) and so forth.

Today it may seem odd or even contradictory that the biography or autobiogr...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PLATES
• CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: RENAISSANCE AND EARLY MODERN
• PART II: ENLIGHTENMENT
• PART III: ROMANTICISM
• PART IV: MODERN AND POSTMODERN