Reading the Early Modern English Diary 3030423263, 9783030423261

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Reading the Early Modern English Diary Miriam Nandi

Reading the Early Modern English Diary

Miriam Nandi

Reading the Early Modern English Diary

Miriam Nandi English Department University of Freiburg Freiburg, Germany

ISBN 978-3-030-42326-1    ISBN 978-3-030-42327-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42327-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © duncan1890 / Getty Images, Image ID: 183344937 This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to thank Monika Fludernik for her role as mentor and supervisor from the earliest stages of this project right through the end. Without her support and encouragement, this project would never have shifted into gear.  I want to extend my thanks to Sieglinde Lemke for providing constructive  feedback, for enlightening conversations over lunch, and for a surprising job offer. My debt also goes to Carl Eduard Scheidt for becoming part of this project in its final stages. I express my deepest gratitude to Sharon Cadman Seelig and Lauren Shohet, both of whom gave me encouraging and spot-on feedback when I drafted the project and again in its final stages. I take pleasure in acknowledging my gratitude to Gabriele Jancke, Claudia Jarzebowski, Andreas Bär, and Claudia Ulbrich for inviting me to the Friedrich Meinecke Institute of Early Modern Studies in Berlin and all their invaluable comments and suggestions. To my wonderful assistants Pia Masurczak, Hannah Blincko, Maxi Albrecht, Dorothee Klein, and Kalina Janewa, many thanks. The external reviewer at Palgrave provided invaluable criticism and very helpful suggestions. Whoever you are, I am genuinely grateful for your brilliant eye. Many thanks to Steve Randall for proofreading! I also want to thank  all those who gave their support on a personal level: my family and my friends and, in particular, my children who have put up with this project for as long as I have. Without the financial support of the European National Fund and the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg for jointly funding my five-year Margarete von Wrangell research fellowship this project would not have been v

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possible. I would like to acknowledge my gratitude towards the German Research Foundation (DFG) for the award of a four-year grant financing the interdisciplinary research cluster Otium: Concepts, Spaces, Figures (SFB 1015, “Muße”) out of which many inspirations for this project emerged. A shorter version of Chap. 5 appeared in the collection How to Do Things with Narrative (de Gruyter), edited by Jan Alber and Greta Olson.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Defining the Diary 17 3 The Diary as Cultural Practice 35 4 Creating Pious Identity: Margaret Hoby’s Reformist Diary 81 5 Anne Clifford’s “Activist” Diaries107 6 “My Own Hearte out of Frame”: Emotions, Relations, and Religion in Ralph Josselin’s Diary137 7 Enjoying the Diary: Samuel Pepys and the Transitions of Diary-Writing161 8 Coda187 Index195

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

With the Covid-19 pandemic, the practice of keeping a diary has become ever more prominent. The New York Times, for instance, featured an article on 13 April 2020, with the headline “Why You Should Start a Coronavirus Diary”. Countless other newspapers, magazines, and foundations all over the world launched their own “Lockdown Diaries” around the same time or have encouraged readers to contribute individual stories to their Coronavirus Diaries platform. Philippe Lejeune, in his seminal study On Diary, suggests that keeping a journal is actually a way “to get out of […] crisis”: The diary offers a space and time protected from the pressures of life. You take refuge in its calm to ‘develop’ the image of what you have just lived through and to meditate upon it, and to examine the choices you make. […] This activity of reflection is also at the heart of diaries maintained in times of crisis. A crisis diary is, I dare say so, in search of its own ending. You are constantly searching how to get out of the crisis, and, as a consequence, out of the diary itself. (Lejeune 2009: 195)

According to Lejeune, writing about pressing emotions in the moment they emerge enables the writer to look at herself from a distance, and thus offers structure and maybe even solace in times of crisis. For Lejeune, the diary is not just a medium for self-reflection but also an affective practice, a way of “unload[ing] the weight of emotions and thoughts” (ibid.) and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Nandi, Reading the Early Modern English Diary, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42327-8_1

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transforming them into narrative. This might be one possible explanation why the diary witnessed a curious rebirth in spring 2020. Lejeune’s emphasis on free emotional self-expression bears the hallmarks of Romanticism in its specific historical context, which encouraged “free [expression of] individual subjects” (Jameson 2013: 140). However, the practice of keeping a diary conspicuously predates the notion of the subject or bourgeois individual. Early modern England witnessed an explosion of diary-writing from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. Encouraged by Cromwell’s rise to power, dissenting or “Puritan” clergy took the opportunity to publish and circulate “do-it-yourself kits” (Lamb 1999: 69) in practical theology. With only very few exceptions, these widely read guidebooks insisted on rigorous daily self-monitoring, which led many literate dissenters to keep a daily log of their pious practices and their inner spiritual progress. Paul Hunter notes that “diary-keeping […] became a national habit practiced by a large percentage of those who were literate” (1990: 303). The present study explores this early history of the diary, analysing how individuals wrote about their lives at a time in which the importance of the individual subject was not taken for granted and was still largely framed by notions of obedience and community. It assesses the possibilities and limitations for self-expression the practice held for the writer. Furthermore, it examines how early modern diarists framed and narrated emotions in a cultural climate that valued self-restraint over a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (Wordsworth: 744). Investigating the varieties and affinities between early modern diaries, this study develops some critical coordinates for reading the early modern diary as one of the pivotal genres of life writing on the one hand and as a cultural practice of affective self-­ monitoring on the other.

Critical Contexts Surveys on early modern autobiographical writing have proliferated in the last decades. In the work of Caldwell (1983), Lynch (2012), and Hindmarsh (2005), the pious “conversion narrative” takes centre stage. Glaser (2001), by contrast, looks at the secular aspects of early modern life writing and discusses various autobiographical genres such as letters, diaries, and memoirs. In addition to diaries, Early Modern English Lives (Bedford et  al. 2007) analyses travel narratives, military journals, and women’s advice books, placing emphasis on topicality (such as time,

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gender, and space) rather than on genre. Meredith Skura (2008) scrutinises the factual/fictional divide in reading a variety of narratives as we would now deem “fictional” as instead autobiographical. Drawing on a host of material from several British archives, Adam Smyth identifies four kinds of texts which would shape autobiographical genres to come: “the printed almanac, annotated with handwritten notes; the financial account; the commonplace book; the parish register” (2010: 1). These studies thus explore autobiographical forms of writing in all their variety, but they do not address the generic and performative specificity of the diary. The reluctance to read for genre is not accidental since the study of autobiographical genres has all too often been vexed by the habit of reading backwards. As Adam Smyth argues, “[g]iving prominence to one or two particular kinds of life writing (the diary; the autobiography, conventionally defined) over others is not only anachronistic; it also represents a missed opportunity: there is so much else out there to explore” (ibid.: 2). While fully concurring with the view that there is “much else out there to explore”, I do not agree with Smyth’s implication that the early modern diary has been explored already. More often than not, the early modern diary is dealt with in passing and deemed a “primitive form of a practice which would, by the nineteenth century, produce the narrativized autobiography and the concept of the individualist self” (Mascuch 1997: 71). Mascuch does not elevate the diary to the status of autobiography, which Phillippe Lejeune famously defined as “retrospective narrative in prose that a real person makes of his own existence when he emphasizes his individual life, especially the story of his personality” (Lejeune 1989: 4). Feminist critics have argued forcefully that the narrow focus on linear, retroactive, and often very stylised autobiographies mythologises the experiences and narrative style of a small minority of urban, male, and upper-class writers while repressing the voices of villagers, ethnic minorities, labourers, and women (see Jelinek 1980, 1986; Nussbaum 1988, 1989; Smith and Watson 1992; Stanton and Plottel 1984). Concomitantly, some of the most exhaustive and interesting diary criticism takes a feminist stance, unearthing and analysing diaries written by women. Suzanne Bunkers and Cynthia Huff’s influential collection of essays, Inscribing the Daily, focusses on American women’s diaries from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Magdalena Ożarska (2013) discusses the “diary poetics” of Fanny Burney, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley. In her seminal Centuries of Female Days  (1988), Harriet Blodgett charts the progress of British women’s journal writing between 1599 and 1939.

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More controversially, feminist criticism has debated potential connections between gender and genre. The first generation of feminist diary critics argued that the fragmented narrative form of the diary mirrored women’s fragmented experience of the everyday (Mason 1980; Culley 1985; Juhacz 1978; Jelinek 1986). This thesis is now considered to be too categorical (Benstock 1988; Peterson 1999; Smith and Watson 1998; Seelig 2006). Focussing on fragmentation might deflect our attention away from the fact that early modern diaries (the diary of Margaret Hoby would be the most obvious example) are often concerned with establishing order and structure. What is more, early modern women diarists do not necessarily resolve the conflicts they face along feminist lines. More recently, diary criticism has focussed on the cultural uses of the diary, particularly with respect to the Victorian era (Steinitz 2011; Millim 2013). In her discussion of Victorian diaries, Rebecca Steinitz demonstrates that the ideal of privacy became “fraught by the routine sharing of manuscript diaries” (Steinitz 2011: 7) in the nineteenth century. Anne-­ Marie Millim similarly challenges the notion that diary-writing was a self-­ indulgent, private activity as she argues that the Victorians saw the diary “as a vital tool in rational decision making” and a means “to achieve professional productivity” (Millim 2013: 1), while it was simultaneously, and somewhat paradoxically, associated with emotional “incontinen[ce]” (Millim 2013: 15). One of the very few studies that investigate the historical genesis of the early modern diary is Stuart Sherman’s Telling Time (1996). Sherman reads the diary as one form of diurnal writing among many others tracing the “critical encounter” (x) between chronometry and the emergence of new prose forms in the 1660s. According to Sherman, a new “technology for counting time emerged simultaneously with a new paradigm for recounting it in prose” (xi). Sherman’s insights have provided me with an excellent starting point for my analysis (see Chap. 2). However, my overarching aim is to analyse the diary not just as temporal but also as a religious and affective practice. I explore how the diary could become a genre associated with emotional self-articulation when it emerged in the context of practices of book-keeping, chronometry, and what we would call “time-­ management”. Consequently, my theoretical angle differs from Sherman’s, and my study investigates a different set of diaries and a different set of metadiscourses on diary-keeping.

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Theoretical Coordinates Diary criticism, from its very inception, has had to confront negative images of its object of study and, concomitantly, has been working towards establishing itself as a valid research area. The comparative scarcity of diary criticism with respect to the general prominence of life writing suggests that the process is still ongoing. In this vein, my study starts with the assumption that early modern diaries can and should be read as texts and not just “raided” (Sherman 1996: 30) as a source for information. Diaries have intricate verbal structures and rhythms. Their reduced, fragmented, enumerative form of narration may not offer a lot of aesthetic reward, but it is suggestive of a pattern and a structure, and thus it can be and should be analysed from a formalist, narratological angle. For this reason, this study draws on a narratological approach to lay out the formal characteristics of the early modern diary. Narratology here is used loosely, as a toolbox rather than a meta-theory, to explore narrative mediation, temporality, and the question of verisimilitude with respect to the early modern diary. As the diary is situated in the interstices between life and writing, formalism or narratology can provide only some first clues towards reading the diary. The second, and more difficult task, is to find a critical idiom to describe what it meant to keep a diary in the early modern era, and thus to analyse the early modern diary as a cultural practice that was endowed with significance and meaning. The early modern diary was a medium for “self-accounting” (Smyth 2010: 2) in more than one sense, documenting not only financial gains and expenses but also more spiritual profits and losses. It entailed rigorous self-examination and self-control, but also the promise of achieving full religious identity, the sense of belonging to a community. As a result, I started this study with the working hypothesis that early modern diaries would be taciturn about issues that are of great importance to the reader in the twenty-first century, such as moments of doubt and clashes between inner feelings and outward expectations. When reading the very first extant English diaries, some of my historicist expectations were actually confirmed. Diarists such as Margaret Hoby construct a sense of self that hinges on notions of obedience and community, rather than on individualism. However, towards the second half of the seventeenth century, diarists such as Ralph Josselin, a Reformist like Hoby, write about their daily lives in a way that resonates more strongly with my twenty-first-century reading habits. Ralph Josselin’s diary

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contains representations of emotions, attitudes, and doubts that I would have associated with more recent ways of writing the self. There must have been “something” in early modern culture that encouraged affective self-­ expression for writers like Josselin, if only in specific contexts. The aim of the first two chapters of this study is to trace that “something”, that is, the traditions and ideologies that paved the way for the articulation of emotions in diaries. Moreover, I set out to find a critical idiom to account for the (surprising) continuities between early modern journals and more recent uses of the diary. I announce this rationale, aware that the concept of the early modern “self” (Greenblatt 1980) or “subject” (Belsey 1985) has been the topic of scholarly debate for several decades. For cultural materialists, the early modern subject is a “nonsubject” (Pye 2000: 1) which has no interiority. Francis Barker put this in a nutshell in his famous statement that “at the center of Hamlet in the interior of the mystery, there is, in short, nothing” (1984: 37). If this were the case, the early modern subject would have been “a blank slate” (Skura 2000: 211) before being “interpellated” (ibid.) into a bourgeois interiority. Like Meredith Skura (2000), Christopher Pye (2000), Katharine Eisaman Maus (1995), John Martin (2004), Gabriele Rippl (1998),  Nancy Selleck (2008)  and Christopher Tilmouth (2013), I intend to move beyond the paradigm of “empty” subjectivity. Such readings eclipse what the practice of diary-keeping meant to the diarist herself. Is it really irrelevant that spirituality offered gratification for early modern diarists (see also Seelig 2006: 28) and that keeping a record of their prayer, churchgoing, and reading the Bible endowed them with “a godly identity” (Lynch 2012: 4)? Can the subject be a “void” (Fumerton 1991: 109) if engaged in affective interpersonal relationships? Skura, Pye, Selleck,  and Maus also locate subjectivity outside of the individual, but they take a more nuanced stance, arguing for an interpersonal subjectivity in which inwardness is “reconceived as an experience situated at the boundary between the person and those to whom he relates, within the dialogic domain of intersubjectivity”, as Christopher Tilmouth summarises (2013: 16). In a similar vein, John Martin, in his critical discussion of Renaissance Individualism, argues that the early modern self emerges in “an enigmatic relation of the interior life to life in society” (2004: 14). Indeed, many early modern diarists do not construct themselves as individuals in an economic, legal, and political sense—as the paradigmatic Enlightenment figure “testing rules from without against a

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sensibility nourished from within” (Coleman et al. 2000: 3); and yet they do write about their inner lives, their religious beliefs, their relationships to kin and patrons, and about the emotions that colour these relationships. My aim is to shed light on the “enigmatic relation” (Martin 2004: 14; my emphasis) between emotional and social life in early modern diaries, on the role emotions play in the construction of inwardness, and on the implications of silence and gaps in diaries. Psychoanalysis has a long tradition of teasing out the implications of “enigmatic” silences, of engaging with norms and obedience, of analysing the structure of relationships, and of reading for affect. In its more literary and cultural-historical variants, psychoanalysis does not presume a universal or ahistorical subjectivity but rather offers a non-reductive means for articulating the “contingency of subject, its irreducible relation to sociality, to symbolic systems, to history” (Pye 2000: 11–12). If brought into dialogue with historicist approaches, psychoanalysis provides a very fruitful reading strategy to address the rigidity of the early modern diary as well as its elusiveness and fluidity. My study follows up on Cynthia Marshall’s concept of “extra-mural psychoanalysis” (2005), that is, the project of transferring psychoanalytic criticism “out of its comfort zone” (such as the study of the nineteenth-century novel) to areas that do not readily lend themselves to it. I take my cue from such historicist readings of psychoanalysis to analyse the cultural functions and uses, the ideological implications, and the affective structures of diary-keeping. In addition to formalist and narratological reading strategies, psychoanalysis thus forms the second important critical coordinate of this study. My thesis is that early modern diaries are used in three different but interrelated ways, which gradually shift and transform in the course of the seventeenth century: as a technique of self-­ monitoring, as a medium to integrate emotions, as a means for self-mirroring. The first extant English diaries illustrate that the diary was a way of organising time within a specific ideological framework and a way of narrating or “telling time” (Sherman 1996). The early modern diary as a genre narrated a life as it passed, but also constituted a way of living a dutiful life. Writing a diary entailed the promise of achieving religious identity, but a religious identity that needed to be asserted repeatedly every day. The process of self-monitoring was constant, serial, and open-­ ended, as was the diary as narrative genre. The Freudian term “super-ego” captures the processual quality of the early modern diary and provides a

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helpful metaphor for the affective workings of many of the pious examples. The Reformist diary is a medium in which every detail of domestic and affective life is documented and monitored. It reaches deeper into the self than Foucault’s disciplinary powers, as diary-keeping is a matter not just of empty performance but of introspection, of viewing one’s very emotions against a pious backdrop. Diarists are encouraged to note not just their love for God but also their lapses into sin, their remorse, and their resolutions for the future. The practice of keeping a diary thus was highly restrictive and circumscribed the life of the writer. Pious diaries offer structure and routine, but a routine that is so restrictive and demanding that it is impossible to stick to. Like Freud’s super-ego, the diary captures the self within a dynamic of dutifulness and transgression, of self-loathing, and of rare moments of the reassuring sense of being a good subject. Thus, in a certain way, diary-­ writing produces the very transgression it seeks to avoid. Diaries tell of such ambiguities within Protestant faith, of the attempt of trying to comply with impossible demands, such as the attempt not to mourn the death of a little child. Diaries thus afford the possibility to narrate inner struggles and to write about emotions that might well disrupt the very ideology the practice of diary-keeping rests upon. As a result, the early modern diary gradually becomes a medium to express emotions in a way that anticipates Lejeune’s idea of the diary as emotional “purge”. The moment of self-distancing entailed in the process of writing creates the possibility of seeing oneself through the eyes of another, of constructing silent witness. Painful emotions become bearable in the process of putting them on paper; joyful emotions become memorable when written down. Put into a psychoanalytic idiom, diaries construct an “object”, an inner listener-figure, a future self, a benign posterity to whom the diarist can confide her feelings—her anxiety, anger, or joy. These pious uses of the diary need to be set apart from practices of diary-keeping that are more clearly oriented towards creating public image. Such diaries appear to lend themselves to canonical new historicist readings, as they engage in a form of self-fashioning in relation to public power rather than private piety. Such diaries could thus be read as mirrors in the psychoanalytic sense, as reflecting an idealised, potentially fictive image of the self. However, I found such diaries rarer than I had anticipated. Even the examples that appeared to be straightforwardly Lacanian on a first glance contained passages that resisted such readings. Diarists of rank such as Lady Anne Clifford, for instance, are aware of their public

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role and power, but they also write about the affective intimacy of social relationships. Rather than placing the early modern diary within clear-cut categories or binaries (secular vs pious diaries, factual vs affective diaries, etc.), I read the early modern diary along the lines of their cultural functions and implications. Diaries can be super-ego materialised, a way of structuring the life along very narrowly circumscribed lines; they can be mirrors reflecting back a fiction of the self that the writer enjoys; they can be objects that hold and store the emotional life of a writer. Some diaries, such as the Diary of Samuel Pepys, are all of these at the same time. These three cultural uses of the diary do not dispense with each other in a teleological or progressivist way. Instead, they are all part of a social-cultural repertoire of diary-keeping.

Corpus Selecting the diaries for this study has been a challenge because of the sheer magnitude of the material. Editions, anthologies, archives, and the resource Early English Books Online hold uncountable diaries produced by early modern Englishmen and women from many different walks of life. My choice of diaries was guided by the intention to provide a wide range of diarists and then to select some exemplary texts. Therefore, I explored both pious and more secular variants of the genre, both rural and urban writers, men and women, the landed elite as well as yeomen. The second important parameter for my selection of diaries is aligned with my theoretical background and methodology for reading diaries. Diaries have specific verbal structures and images, a texture and a rhythm, and I intended to give each diary a thorough textual reading. As a result, my selection had to be exemplary rather than exhaustive. I ended up settling on four diaries, each of which will be analysed in a separate case study: I chose two women diarists—the Yorkshire gentlewoman Margaret Hoby (1571–1633), whose journal is the first extant diary of an Englishwoman, and Lady Anne Clifford (1580–1676). Clifford was among the elite in early modern England, and her decade-long struggle to regain her patrimony made her famous even in her own time, unlike Hoby, whose diary was rediscovered by feminist critics only comparatively recently. In a similar vein, I chose an established figure, urban and secular, as well as a lesser-known figure, who hails from a rural and pious background. I focus on the diary of the Essex clergyman Ralph Josselin (1617–1683),

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whose work is quite prominent among historians (see MacFarlane 1970, 1978; Jarzebowski 2016) but comparatively marginal in literary study (see however Bedford et al. 2007). Reading Josselin’s at times agonising self-­ doubt next to the characteristically bawdy London Diary of Samuel Pepys proved to be very rewarding and interesting. The reception of Pepys has been particularly rich and controversial. His Diary is often seen as anticipating later-eighteenth-century variants of the genre (see Kohlmann 2010; Mascuch 1997; Sherman 1996), with its urbanity, sobriety, worldliness, and its interest in trade and consumer culture. Earlier approaches explore the traces of his “Puritan” education at St Paul’s (Barker 1984; Hill 1985). I will balance my own reading against Pepys criticism and analyse the affinities and differences between the Diary and the three other journals.

Structure/Overview The first chapter opens with a general discussion on genre and lays out some narratological grids for defining the generic characteristics of the diary. Specifically, it addresses questions of narrative mediation, temporality, and authorship. Furthermore, it explores how the diary navigates between life and writing, drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s concept of mimesis. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the communicative structure of the diary and its alleged secrecy or intimacy. ‘The cultural history of the English diary is the focus of Chap. 3, its material preconditions and metadiscourses, assessing how early modern discourses on self-monitoring and self-examination inflected the practice of diary-keeping. On a theoretical level, it brings early modern pious anthropologies (Calvin, Perkins, Rogers) into a dialogue with psychoanalytic theories of culture. As a next step, I discuss early modern languages of feeling and intersubjective models of the self. I hope to show that object relations theory provides a critical vocabulary that helps to bridge the gulf that separates me, a critic in the twenty-first century, from early modern writers. The chapter concludes with a more general discussion on the cultural history of emotions and the recent debate between cognitive theories of emotions and historicist approaches. Following up on the two methodological chapters, four individual diarists are discussed in separate chapters. I begin with the diary of Margaret Hoby, which she kept between 1599 and 1605. The text is remarkable because of its obdurate silence on her attitudes, thoughts, and emotions.

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Both on a structural and on a thematic level, Hoby follows the grid recommended in Calvinist tracts on self-monitoring: She keeps her diary on a regular basis and in strict chronological order. Furthermore, she attempts to match her own life against religious ideals. As a result, her journal is indeed quite dry and repetitive, as Sharon Seelig contends (2006: 20). There are, however, some instances in which Hoby breaks the monotonous litany of her journal. Characteristically, these passages focus exclusively on her religious anxieties. Hoby never actually “fashions” herself (Greenblatt 1980) as a model Christian figure, instead stressing her own inadequacy. She does articulate a sense of self; however, her narrative identity is characterised by passivity, obedience, and receptivity rather than by an emergent individualism. Her diary does not convey the confident sense of being a “Puritan saint”, as Diane Willen notes with respect to other Protestant women (1992: 563). Hoby’s interiority, as constructed on the pages of her journal, is fragmented rather than unified and only becomes coherent through repetition and routine. The diaries of Anne Clifford mark a decisive break with the pious habit of self-monitoring, as I will argue in Chap. 5. Lady Anne’s diaries were instrumental in the struggle to regain her patrimony; as a consequence, Clifford has been characterised as a “proto-feminist” (Lewalski 1991). Partly recuperating Barbara Lewalski’s observation that Clifford positions herself in a lineage of strong female kin in her conflict with male authorities, I suggest that Clifford’s diaries waver between public self-assertion and private self-expression. Clifford’s writing mirrors her fight for her patrimony even at a time when the heritage was securely hers. In this vein, her diary is not only or exclusively part of her political strategy, but something less tangible, an “object” (Winnicott 2005) in the psychoanalytic sense, constructing a listener-figure or a benign posterity. Chapter 6 traces the cultural career of dissenting ideologies in the diary of the Essex clergyman Ralph Josselin. Like Margaret Hoby half a century earlier, Josselin constantly matches his experiences against his religious belief. In the process, his diary produces a very ambiguous inwardness. On the one hand, his obedience is psychologically disruptive—Josselin can never fully meet God’s demands, nor does he always manage to discern God’s will in the first place. On the other hand, it is also a cohesive force: his sense of guilt also provides a regenerative purge and gives him the reassurance of belonging to the elect. Another striking characteristic of Josselin’s diary is its thematic variety: issues of faith predominate, of course, but the diarist also writes about

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social relationships, his family, and his emotional attachment to the people that surround him. In discussing the way Josselin writes about his family and other social relations, I hope to show that Josselin’s sense of self is inseparable from these relationships. His identity therefore is not individualist, or at least not “rampant[ly]” (MacFarlane 1978: 63) so, but primarily social. He constructs his identity with respect to what psychoanalysis calls significant “objects”, that is, persons to whom he is emotionally attached, such as his wife, family, relatives, and members of the parish. Chapter 7, “Enjoying the Diary”, explores the Diary of Samuel Pepys. It assesses recurrent tropes in Pepys criticism such as the Diary’s alleged “Puritanism” (Barker 1984: 8), Pepys’s bourgeois individualism, and the capacious, encompassing quality of his writing. Revisiting Francis Barker’s notorious reading of Pepys as a “tormented Puritan”, I suggest that Pepys’s use of the diary form indeed partly overlaps with that of his contemporary Josselin. Like Josselin, Pepys is surprisingly frank with respect to his emotions, although the pious framework that circumscribes Josselin’s text has obviously faded in Pepys’s Diary. Scrutinising the notion that the Diary epitomises an emergent ideology of bourgeois individualism, I suggest that Pepys constructs his life in terms of community. The Diary is populated by kinfolk, friends, acquaintances, and, of course, by lovers. Pepys’s creation of narrative identity is, I argue, set in the transitional space between individualism and relationality, between private autonomy and public duty, between Restoration libertinage and affective sentimentalism. Rather than simply ascribing the capaciousness of the Diary to the alleged curiosity of the historical persona Samuel Pepys, I propose that the Diary includes the transitions that marked the Restoration period, from public to private, from feudal to bourgeois, from pious to secular. These transitions are not, however, mechanical stages which dispense with each other, but they are organically included in the cultural repertoire of Restoration England.

References Barker, Francis (1984) The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection. London: Methuen. Bedford, Ronald, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly (2007) Early Modern English Lives: Autobiography and Self-Representation 1500–1660. Aldershot: Ashgate. Belsey, Catherine (1985) The Subject of Tragedy. London: Methuen.

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Benstock, Shari Ed. (1988) The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Blodgett, Harriet (1988) Centuries of Female Days: English Women’s Private Diaries. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Caldwell, Patricia (1983) The Puritan Conversion Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coleman, Patrick, Jayne Lewis, and Jill Kowalik (2000) Representations of the Self from Renaissance to Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Culley, Margo (1985) A Day at a Time: Diary Literature of American Women from 1764 to Present. New York: Feminist Press. Fumerton, Patricia (1991) Cultural Aesthetics. Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Glaser, Brigitte (2001) The Creation of the Self in Autobiographical Forms of Writing in Seventeenth-Century England: Subjectivity and Self-Fashioning in Memoirs, Diaries, and Letters. Heidelberg: Winter. Greenblatt, Stephen (1980) Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Hill, Christopher (1985) “Samuel Pepys (1633–1703).” The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill. Volume One: Writing and Revolution in the 17th Century. Brighton: Harvester Press. 259–274. Hindmarsh, D.  Bruce (2005) The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hunter, Paul (1990) Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. New York: Norton. Jameson, Frederic (2013) The Political Unconscious. Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act. London and New York: Routledge. Jarzebowski, Claudia (2016) Kindheit und Emotion. Kinder und ihre Lebenswelten in der europäischen Frühen Neuzeit. Oldenburg: de Gruyter. Jelinek, Estelle C. (1980) “Introduction: Women’s Autobiography and the Male Tradition.” Women’s Autobiography. Essays in Criticism. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. ———. (1986) The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography. Boston, MA: Twayne. Juhacz, Suzanne (1978) “‘Some Deep Old Desk or Capacious Hold-All’: Form and Women’s Autobiography.” College English 39. 663–668. Kohlmann, Benjamin (2010) “‘Men of Sobriety and Buisnes’: Pepys, Privacy, and Public Duty.” Review of English Studies 61.251: 535–71. Lamb, Mary Ellen (1999) “Margaret Hoby’s Diary: Women’s Reading Practices and the Gendering of the Reformation Subject.” Pilgrimage for Love: Essays in Early Modern Literature in Honor of Josephine A.  Roberts. Ed. Sigrid King. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. 63–94. Lejeune, Phillippe (1989) On Autobiography. Ed. John Eakin. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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——— (2009) On Diary. Ed. Jeremy E. Pomkin and Julie Rak. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. Lewalski, Barbara K. (1991) “Re-Writing Patriarchy and Patronage: Margaret Clifford, Anne Clifford, and Aemilia Lanyer.” Yearbook of English Studies 21: 87–106. Lynch, Kathleen (2012) Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century Anglophone World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacFarlane, Alan (1970) “The Family Life of Ralph Josselin.” An Essay in Historical Anthropology. London: University Press. ——— (1978) The Origins of English Individualism. Oxford: Blackwell. Marshall, Cynthia (2005) “Extra-Mural Psychoanalysis.” Shakespeare Studies 33. 51–56. Martin, John Jeffries (2004) Myths of Renaissance Individualism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mascuch, Michael (1997) Origins of the Individualist Self. Cambridge: Polity. Mason, Mary G. (1980) “The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers.” Autobiography. Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 207–235. Maus, Katherine Eisaman (1995) Inwardness and Theatre in the English Renaissance. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Millim, Anne-Marie (2013) The Victorian Diary: Authorship and Emotional Labour. Farnham: Ashgate. Nussbaum, Felicity (1988) “Towards Conceptualizing Diary.” Studies in Autobiography: Essays from the International Symposium on Autobiography and Autobiography Studies, Held at Louisiana State University in March 1985. Ed. James Olney. New York: Oxford University Press. 128–140. ——— (1989) The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-­ Century England. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ożarska, Magdalena (2013) Lacework or Mirror? Diary Poetics of Frances Burney, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Peterson, Linda (1999) Traditions of Victorian Autobiography. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Pye, Christopher (2000) The Vanishing: Shakespeare, the Subject, and Early Modern Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rippl, Gabriele (1998) Lebenstexte. München: Fink. Seelig, Sharon Cadman (2006) Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women’s Lives, 1600–1680. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Selleck, Nancy (2008) The Interpersonal Idiom in Shakespeare, Donne, and Early Modern Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Sherman, Stuart P. (1996) Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Skura, Meredith Anne (2000) “Early Modern Subjectivity and the Place of Psychoanalysis in Cultural Analysis: The Case of Richard Norwood.” Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture. Eds. Peter Brooks and Alex Woloch. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 211–221. ——— (2008) Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson (1992) De-Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ——— (1998) Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Smyth, Adam (2010) Autobiography in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stanton, Domna, and Jeanine Parisier Plottel (1984) The Female Autograph. New York: New York Literary Forum. Steinitz, Rebecca (2011) Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth Century British Diary. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Tilmouth, Christopher (2013) “Passions and Intersubjectivity in Early Modern Literature.” Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture. Eds. Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis. Farnham: Ashgate. 13–32. Winnicott, Donald W. (2005) Playing and Reality [1978]. Routledge Classics. London and New York: Routledge. Wordsworth, William (1992) Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems. Eds. James Butler and Karen Green. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Defining the Diary

“What is a diary? I studied the genre for more than a dozen years before it occurred to me to define it”, confesses Philippe Lejeune (2009: 168). He continues, I know very well what a diary is! I kept one as a young man […]. It’s easy enough: you take some paper […], you write down the date, and then you write whatever you’re doing, thinking, and feeling. There is no set form, no required content. You have a free hand. (ibid.: 168)

The diary is indeed a haphazard genre, which appears to escape a clear-cut definition. But even if the genre’s borders are “porous” (ibid.: 168), it is nevertheless possible and necessary to characterise some of its most important textual features. In what follows, I will lay out the generic characteristics of the early modern diary, starting with the question of narrative mediation and the genre’s specific relationship to time. I then move on to discuss the way the genre navigates between life and writing, drawing on the work of Paul Ricoeur. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the diary’s communicative structure.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Nandi, Reading the Early Modern English Diary, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42327-8_2

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Narrative Mediation The diary is typically defined as a “log or record” of activities, events, experiences, feelings, and thoughts kept on a regular basis (Abbott 2008: 106). As Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson summarise, the diary is “[a] form of periodic life writing [that] records dailiness in accounts and observations of emotional responses” (Smith and Watson 2010: 193). The term was first mentioned in the Oxford English Dictionary as early as 1580, while “autobiography” emerges much later in The Monthly Review in 1797 (Ożarska 2013: 33). Diaries, like most other forms of life writing, are single-authored texts (Abbott 2008: 106), although one might complicate the notion of authorship in cases in which diarists employed scribes (see Kunin 2004). Diary-­ writing is often associated with spontaneity; it is thought to be written from a position of being “immersed in the present” (Cottam 2001: 268). Only few diaries contain longer entries in which diarists look back on the events of their early life. Such miniature autobiographical incipits may have Bildungsroman-structures, in which an older, mature “narrating self” establishes a characteristic difference from the behaviour of a younger, “experiencing self” (Stanzel 1986: 201), as the first entries of Ralph Josselin’s diary for instance. In most other diaries, however, there is only a short temporal distance between the narrated events and the time of narration. One might therefore describe the temporal structure of the diary in term of what Gérard Genette calls “simultaneous narration”, that is, a “narrative in the present contemporaneous with the action” (Genette: 216–217). Yet, this conclusion might be a bit rushed. As Dorrit Cohn has shown in her seminal study on simultaneous narration, any event can only be narrated after it has happened: Fiction cast as simultaneous narration almost always allows its unimaginable narrative situation to remain in the shadows. Unlike standard […] autobiographies, with their often obtrusively foregrounded narrational and mnemonic stance, these deviant texts themselves tend to discourage questions concerning their ostensible origin. (1978: 105)

Cohn here draws on narratives such as the “Penelope” section in Ulysses, which conveys a sense of immediacy while at the same time being characteristically elusive. These narratives do not call attention to the temporal

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relation “between narrated experience and narrating instance” as Cohn asserts (ibid.). In this vein, the formal make-up of such fictive simultaneous narratives hardly overlaps with diaries, which typically use deictic markers (the date on the page, often even the time of day) so that the temporal relation between the narrated instances is easily discernable. In a very important way, simultaneous narration is “impossible” (ibid.: 106). The spontaneity and immediacy evoked in dairies does not emerge from the temporal relation constructed in the text, but with the diary’s dual function as text and cultural practice. My observation loosely ties in with Susan Lanser’s distinction between “attached” and “detached” forms of narration, in which she modifies classical narratological distinctions between factual and fictional narratives (2005: 208). According to Lanser, “attached” narratives derive their significance from the equation of the work’s presumptive author with the texts’ primary ‘I’. Readers may deconstruct this ‘I,’ may argue that it utters meanings the author did not ‘intend,’ [b]ut in practice, not even the most postmodern reader treats a work of scholarship, a letter to the editor, or an autobiography as if the author in the text were not also the author of the text. That may be why we so rarely use the term ‘implied author’. (2005: 208–209)

“Detached” narratives, by contrast, are such texts that are conventionally read “in detachment from and usually in indifference to their author’s— though not to their culture’s—identities” (ibid.: 209). The National Anthem or the Apostle’s Creed would be such examples. The diary falls into the former category: diaries are “attached” texts in Lanser’s sense, as they derive much of their meaning and significance from their relationship to a specific author. This is particularly prominent in women’s diaries. As Harriet Blodgett points out in her seminal work on women diarists, Centuries of Female Days, women “write against a background of centuries of female disparagement” (1988: 4). Hence, the author (her gender, her position in society, etc.) is significant in diary studies, even if the diary is not written in a confessional mode or biographical information on the author is missing.

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Genetic and Temporal Characteristics of the Diary The term “diary” means “day” (Latin “diarium”, literally “daily allowance”) in its root sense, thus denoting its mode of composition. Unlike the memoir or the autobiography, the diary narrates life as it passes, and is thus very specific in terms of its genetic (rather than generic) mode. Porter H. Abbott suggests that the hallmark of the diary as a genre is its “intercalated” mode of composition (2008: 106), which means that the writing process is situated between the narrated events. Abbott borrows the term from Genette’s study Figures III, in which Genette uses the term to designate types of narration that differ from retrospective forms. Philippe Lejeune has objected to the term “intercalated”, arguing that the diarist does not write from a position of being in-between or “intercalated” between “two equivalent things” (2009: 208). Instead, he suggests that the diary “advances with the moving front of life, digesting the near past and filling the near future with plans” (ibid.), a phenomenon which he encapsulates using the term “progressive”. In contrast to the autobiography, in which the narrated events are moulded to fit a linear pattern, the diary offers no closure or “resolution” (Doll and Munns 2006: 154). The open-ended structure of the journal is determined by its mode of composition: diarists literally do not know about the outcomes of the plot of their lives (Smith and Watson 2010: 193). The question so crucial for the autobiography—“how did I become what I am” (see Lejeune 1989)—is rarely an issue in the diary. The diary as a genre does not attempt to “see life steadily and see it whole” (Stauffer 1930: 55, quoted in Nussbaum 1988: 128); it has no overarching telos. For this reason, the diary has often been described with a rhetoric of belittlement, as a genre that lacks formal structure, intellectual rigour, and maturity. In his “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography”, George Gusdorf constructs the diary as the proverbial “other” of the more elegant and mature autobiography: The author of a private journal noting his impressions and mental states from day to day, fixes the portrait of his daily reality without any concern for continuity. Autobiography, on the other hand, requires a man to take a distance with regard to himself in order to reconstitute himself in the focus of his special unity and identity across time. (Gusdorf 1980: 35)

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Gusdorf is not interested in the “private journal” itself but uses the genre as a point of reference to set it apart from the autobiography, a contrast that is further highlighted by the phrase “on the other hand”. Gusdorf’s moral overtones, the heroic pathos with which he describes the autobiographer, the tacit gender and class bias in his theory have come in for a lot of criticism. However, the moralism and heroism set aside, Gusdorf points to an important characteristic of the diary, that is, the genre’s relationship to time. Unlike Gusdorf, diary criticism suggests that the diurnal format has its own merits and is worth investigating. In this vein, Stuart Sherman, in his study Telling Time (1996), reads the diary in connection with a growing awareness of time, which emerged from technological innovations in chronometry in the early modern era (see also Chap. 3). According to him, the way the diary narrates—in terms of repetitive sequences, without telos or closure—echoes the ticking of a clock. For Sherman, diaries are “chronography”; they “narrate time” just like clocks “tell time” (ibid.: 10). He argues that diaries did not just emerge in connection with innovations in chronometry—he mentions the invention of the pocket-watch in the mid-seventeenth century—but they also echo the enumerative, repetitive structure of time-keeping. Invoking Frank Kermode’s lecture, The Sense of an Ending, Sherman characterises the formal make-up of the diary in terms of a horological onomatopoeia: the diary narrativises events along sequential lines just like the “Tick, Tick, Tick” of the watch (ibid.: 10; emphasis in original). For Kermode, however, narratives are characterised by plot and closure, a phenomenon which he encapsulates in the onomatopoeia “Tick-Tock”: The clock’s tick-tock I take to be a model of what we call a plot, an organization that humanizes time by giving it form; and the interval between tock and tick represents purely successive, disorganized time. (Kermode 1967: 45)

Sherman suggests that the closure-oriented “tick-tock” form of narrative, of “humanize[d]” time, is precisely not the way the diary works. Like Kermode, he follows up on the work of the phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur, who suggests that such chronography is the “true contrary” of “temporality itself” (1984: 30). Here, Ricoeur draws on the classic distinction between chronos and kairos, that is, the time of sequence and duration (chronos) and time as experienced by human beings, as moments filled with meaning and significance (kairos). Narrative needs the fullness of

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kairos, of the significant moment, rather than the empty succession of chronos. Thus, Ricoeur, by implication, denies the diary the “fullness” of narrative. Sherman invokes some very good reasons why the diary’s temporal organisation should not be too hastily dismissed as lacking or defective. According to him, diaries achieve narrative “fullness” (1996: 10) through adjacency and accumulation. Following up on the work of Hayden White, Sherman suggests that the diary echoes the medieval chronicle form (White 1987: 10–11; qtd. in Sherman 1996: 13). Like the chronicle, the diary also lacks “causal connection” (White 1987: 5). The annalist’s calendar “locates events not in time of eternity, not in kairotic time, but in chronological time, in time as it is humanly experienced. This time has no high points or low points—no Kairos: it is, we might say, paratactical and endless” (ibid.: 8). But “that very adjacency” imbues the calendar with meaning. Time becomes “kairotic” or full by dint of “its relentless successiveness” (Sherman 1996: 13). Sherman concludes that from the late seventeenth century onwards the “temporality of Tick, Tick, Tick recognizably presides over remarkable developments in both chronometry and narrative” (ibid.: 8). Further linking the diurnal form with chronometry, Sherman asserts that the late seventeenth century witnesses a nationwide desire for a Tick, Tick, Tick ever lighter, ever more distinct, more uniform in both its pulse and its intervals. Concurrent with this quest, textual practices developed along parallel lines. The production of new installments at regular intervals became a common, even a determining feature in several genres: diaries, periodicals, daily newspapers, diurnal essays. This new, pervasive textual timing served […] a particular purpose: a continuous self-construction, a running report on identities both shifting and fixed, private and public. The serial and closely calibrated temporality that became a widespread preoccupation […] and […] a widespread practice in prose written, distributed, and read over steady, small increments of time. (ibid.: 8)

While Sherman’s cultural-historical reconstruction of the diurnal form is very lucid and convincing, his defence of the diary’s narrative “fullness” paradoxically reiterates the dichotomy between plot-oriented narrative and non-narrative, enumerative forms of writing, a binary model that has been scrutinised particularly in diachronic narratology (see von Contzen 2018: 318). Characteristically, diaries are set in a spectrum between these

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two poles. Diaries may consist of entries that contain only of a few words each, as most of the entries in the later years of Margaret Hoby’s diary. They may include long narrative descriptions of events, such as Samuel Pepys’s recollections of the Great Fire. More often than not, diaries include both enumeration and narrative fullness, varying from individual entry to individual entry. Therefore, one of the most defining characteristics of the diary is the date on the page, which separates one diary entry from another. I suggest dividing diaries in two levels: the diary in its entirety (“D”) and the level of the respective entries (“E”): D______________________________________________________________ E1____ E2______ E3____ E4 …

If a given diary consists of several (edited) volumes, then its formal structure would need to be described as follows: D1_____________________________________________________________ E1____ E2______ E3____ E4 … D2_____________________________________________________________ E1____ E2______ E3____ E4 …

On level D, the diary is indeed perfectly chronological: each dated entry follows the next. There are no prolepses or analepses on this level (which would entail a later date preceding an earlier date). As the chronological structure of level D is connected with the “intercalated” mode of composition of the diary, anachrony does not take place. On level E, however, there can be “achronic” (Genette 1993: 62) instances of storytelling. A diarist can look back upon the distant past—as Lady Anne Clifford does in the last years of her life—or use the diary to write down plans for the future, as Samuel Pepys does frequently. Thus, the recurrent trope in diary criticism that the genre is “always chronological” (see Smith and Watson 2010: 193) is a simplification. Diaries are chronological on level D, but they do often contain achrony on level E. Another typical characteristic of the diary on level D is that it hardly ever uses “iterative narration” (Genette 1993: 64), that is, “acceleration by means of an identifying syllepsis of events posited as relatively similar (‘Every Sunday…’)” (ibid.). Instead, diaries, on level D, are replete with repetitions. Diarists quite literally write every Sunday about going to

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Church rather than mentioning their general habit once (e.g. “I go to church every Sunday”), as an autobiographer or a letter-writer would. In terms of pace or tempo, the diary is paradoxically decelerated with respect to level D, and accelerated with respect to level E. On level D, diaries are often much lengthier than autobiographies, novels, or even epics. Ralph Josselin’s diary, for instance, consists of roughly 290,000 words (MacFarlane 1976: xxi). As the diary is kept on a regular, possibly daily, basis, the storytelling on level D is slowed down to such an extent that diaries can be “unreadable” as Lejeune points out (2009: 171, emphasis in original). This raises the question to what extent diaries are narrative in the post-­ classical, cognitive sense of the term (Alber 2013; Fludernik 1996), that is, texts that “convey the experience of living through [a] storyworld-in-flux” (Herman 2009: 14), a question that can hardly be answered categorically. My analysis situates the diary in the middle of a spectrum, ranging from purely classificatory, non-narrative forms such as lists and calendars to more “experiential” (Fludernik 1996: 12) narratives such as memoirs and autobiographies.

Diaries as Practice and Mimesis The study of life writing has been haunted by the question of the mimetic quality of language ever since Paul de Man’s “Autobiography as De-Facement” (1979) in which he scrutinises Phillippe Lejeune’s idea of the “autobiographical pact” (1989) and the concomitant promise of truthfulness associated with autobiography. For De Man, autobiography is a figure of reading rather than a genre. Thus, the veracity of the autobiography is a product of the text and has little or nothing to do with the relationship between the text and the world. Some of De Man’s scepticism has been fruitfully integrated into diary studies (see Doll and Munns 2006). The narrative voice in the early modern diary may very well be a “self-dramatizing persona” (Doll and Munns 2006: 12), creating an image of the self that is only with hindsight read as a mimetic portrayal of the author. Clearly, diaries are not always absolutely sincere, but they may have a fictional quality (ibid.). Yet, if diarists appear self-dramatising or self-deceiving, there must be a self that is dramatised and a persona who does the dramatising. Concomitantly, if the diarist deceives herself, then there must be a part of the self that is deceived (see also Straub 2012: 115). Diaries do not articulate a writer’s established

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stable identity but instead create preliminary, temporally structured components of a person’s identity. Thus, even the most sceptical diary critic will have to concede that diaries do raise certain claims to authenticity that are of a different nature than “the constructed world of fiction” (Marcus 2018: 4). For Phillippe Lejeune, diaries are “antifiction” rather than “autofiction” (2009: 201), a term he coins to set the diary apart from genres such as autobiography or biography: “The diary grows weak and faints or breaks out in a rash when it comes into contact with fiction” (ibid.). While the autobiography rests on a “pact” (see Lejeune 1989) with an imaginary reader, diaries are written without a readership in mind. In a very important way, diaries are mimetic texts, but not in the sense that they “reflect” a given reality. The truth claims raised by the diary are not empirical, but phenomenological, bridging the gap between life and narrative. The work of the philosopher Paul Ricoeur is instructive in this context, not just because his phenomenology is a constant attempt to analyse the connections between life and writing rather than the chasm between the two, but also because he is an “an overtly Christian philosopher” (Simms 2003: 7). His concern with faith might be seen as fraught in our times, but it is definitely attuned to a mindset in which atheism was “unthinkable to the most daring philosophical minds” (Greenblatt 1980: 22). More often than not, early modern diurnal identity is “pre-figured”, as Ricoeur would put it (1984: 54), in terms of Christian ideas of what makes a good life. On a more general level, Ricoeur develops his theory of mimesis in an attempt to bridge the gap between life and narrative. According to Ricoeur, “life has something to do with narrative” (1991a: 20), while at the same time, he is aware that “stories are recounted and not lived; life is lived and not recounted” (ibid.). In his three-volume work Temps et recit (Time and Narrative), he seeks to reconcile these opposites. On a general level, he follows a two-pronged strategy. First, he demonstrates that the way we experience life and time is not completely distinct from the way we comprehend narrative. Second, he shows that narrative—be it fictional or factual—always relies on certain real-world parameters. Ricoeur’s first argument is based on the idea that emplotment is not just a structure of narrative but also a cognitive framework (see 1984: 31–51). Ricoeur points out that plot (or muthos in Aristotle) is “not a static structure but rather an operation, an integrating process” which is completed by the reader. Only the reader can come up with a “synthesis of heterogeneous elements” and hence with an emplotment (1991a: 21).

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According to Ricoeur, the distinction between text and life can only be made along linguistic, analytical lines. Ricoeur’s concept of emplotment does not, however, eradicate the distinction between life and narrative. There is a “kinship” (Carr 1991: 168) between narrative structure (i.e. emplotment) and our experiences; however, the two are not identical. Ricoeur is very much aware that—as agents in everyday life—we are precisely not authors because we have little control over the plot of our lives. The second strategy Ricoeur develops to bridge the gap between the world and the text is his concept of mimesis, which complicates the ideas of verisimilitude and referentiality typically associated with the term. Mimesis for Ricoeur can be divided into three different kinds (see 1984: 52–82): Mimesis I is closely linked to his notion of emplotment. Ricoeur suggests that we would not be able to understand narrative if it did not resemble our experiences along logical and temporal lines to a certain degree. Thus, our experiences are prefigured in a way that is akin to narrative. We have a “preliminary competence” (Ricoeur 1984: 54) of understanding human action, which later enables us to understand plot. This emplotted “prefiguration” of our experiences is what Ricoeur will call mimesis I: Whatever the innovative force of poetic composition within the field of our temporal experience may be, the composition of plot is grounded in a pre-­ understanding of the world of action, its meaningful structures, its symbolic resources, and its temporal character. (1984: 54)

Mimesis I is pretextual and thus pre-narrative as it relates exclusively to cognitive parameters (Fludernik 1996: 23). It describes the cognitive competences we need for all kinds of trivial everyday practices such as making coffee or cleaning up a cluttered desk, all of which have a meaningful temporal structure and an overarching aim or telos. Without such a preliminary understanding of time and structure, an understanding that resembles basic and more complex forms of narrative, we would be seriously impaired when carrying out the tasks of our everyday life. Mimesis II, by contrast, refers to narrative itself. However, when Ricoeur returns to his idea of emplotment, he places his emphasis on the work of “configuration” (Ricoeur 1984: 65) within a text. Mimesis II encapsulates the process in which the text is moulded into an “intelligible whole” (ibid.: 65). Narrative has an inner logic, even if its temporal structure, setting, or characters may defy our everyday experiences. Mimesis II

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brings together different elements of the story, and “the reader is implicated in this grasping-together” (Simms 2003: 85). In disjointed or “unnatural” narratives (Alber 2013), the reader will face the challenge of having to do most of the emplotting and integrating herself. It is important to stress here that Ricoeur conceptualises mimesis II as a dynamic process. He explains that the dynamism lies in the fact that a plot already exercises, within its own textual field, an integrating and, in this sense, a mediating function, which allows to bring about, beyond this field a mediation of a larger amplitude between preunderstanding and […] the postunderstanding of the order of action and its temporal features. (1984: 65)

Thus, Ricoeur’s concept of mimesis II should not be parsed with a simplified concept of verisimilitude. Ricoeur is interested in how unity-in-variety is established. Mimesis II describes the way “emplotment brings together factors as heterogenous as agents, goals, means, interactions, circumstances, unexpected results” (ibid.: 65). The work of “refiguration” of a text in the world, which Ricoeur calls mimesis III, addresses the “intersections of the world of the text and the world of the hearer—the intersection, therefore, of the world configured by the poem and the world wherein real action occurs and unfolds” (1991a: 26, see also Simms 2003: 85). For Ricoeur, literature has a performative power; it produces its own reception rather than simply “mirroring” a given reality. Ricoeur’s concept of mimesis III highlights “the effect that the text produces on his receiver, whether individual or collective” (1984: 77). Ricoeur’s mimesis III is particularly resonant with respect to early modern conduct books and tracts in practical theology. What is more, it is a reminder that diary-keeping was a practice first and foremost, while “[t]he text itself is a mere by-product, a residue” (Lejeune 2009: 31). Viewed through the lens of Ricoeur’s theory, the diary is not just a way of narrating the past, of “figuration” (mimesis II), but entails all three levels of mimesis. It is prefigured (mimesis I) by ideologies of pious interiority, practices of time-keeping, and manuals on diary-keeping. Kept on a regular basis, the diary has a structuring (or “re-figuring”) function with respect to the diarists’ life (mimesis III). If a diarist could match her experiences and life with the models described in conduct books, she would “possess a well-ordered and integrated sense of herself—who she was, where she had come from, and where she was going” (Hindmarsh 2005:

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38). As mimesis in Ricoeur’s sense, the diary is more than a practice of memory, and thus more than a way of relating to the past. The diary points in several temporal directions at the same time—the past, the present, and the future. Ricoeur’s threefold notion of mimesis provides a lucid model to describe how the early modern diary vacillates between narrating a life and being a practice within the life of the diarist. Furthermore, his notion of mimesis is flexible enough for this purpose and does not lapse into a revisionist model of verisimilitude. However, it obviously also has its limitations and downsides: Ricoeur does not develop a critical idiom with which to analyse the ideological overtones of the early modern discourse on diary-keeping. He is perhaps overly invested in “faith”, in all possible senses of the word, and professes little scepticism towards the human capacity to create what he calls “synthesis” or “concordance” (1991a: 21). His concept of “narrative identity” (1991b) is symptomatic of this problem: According to Ricoeur, “narrative constructs the durable properties of a character, what one could call his narrative identity, by constructing the kind of dynamic identity found in the plot which creates the character’s identity” (ibid.: 195; my emphasis). This synthetic view of narrative identity may be mirrored in Gusdorfian models of the autobiography, in which authors typically attempt to represent a life in its totality. The Gusdorfian autobiography may indeed create “concordance” of “disconcordant elements” (1991a: 21), as they integrate disruptive and contingent events into a plot (typically, one of maturation and quest). However, I find it difficult to read diurnal identity in terms of “durable properties”. Characteristically, diarists do not fuse past memories, present experiences, and future plans into a “temporal totality” (ibid.: 22). Teleological quest structures so prominent in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century autobiographies are characteristically absent in diaries. Diaries are filled with the clutter of the everyday, with shifting affective states, with experiences that may be of some urgency at one moment and are already irrelevant in the next entry. They are too unfinished, too fragmented, as to allow for constructions of a concordant, unified self. As Felicity Nussbaum argues in an early article, diaries articulate “discrete moments of experience” (1988: 132) and, in so doing, construct “a multiplicity of contestatory selves” (ibid.) rather than a unified “autobiographical subject” (see Nussbaum 1989). The early modern context further complicates the issue of narrative identity. Early modern England was a highly theatrical society, and the

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diary’s relationship to performance and ritual is difficult to assess from a narratological or a phenomenological angle. Thus, Ricoeur’s phenomenology provides some pertinent first clues for a practice-oriented model of the early modern diary, but the larger ideological framework in which the early modern diary is embedded needs to be explored from another angle (see Chap. 3).

Diaries and Communication Diaries are often seen as the epitome of intimacy and privacy. The Encyclopedia of Life Writing, for instance, suggests that “secrecy defines the diary as both text and practice” (Cottam 2001: 268; on secrecy and the diary see also Lejeune 2009: 201–202). According to this view, the communicative structure of the diary—its lack of addressee—sets it apart from the epistolary form, as the letter has an explicit addressee while the diary only implies the potential of being read by future generations (Lejeune 2009: 84; Genette 1980: 230: FN 44). Unlike the letter, memoir, or autobiography, the diary is defined as a “communication-that-is-­ not-to-be-communicated” (Cottam 2001: 268). Its author may be the only person who reads the diary while she or he is alive. In the language of narratology, the communicative structure of the diary would be described as follows A (author) = N (narrator) = C (character) = R (reader). Such characterisations of the diary hinge on a historical context in which concepts such as privacy, intimacy, and domesticity were already firmly established. However, as the authors of Early Modern English Lives remind us, “in early modern English writings there did not exist the sharp division that is commonly made today between a private ‘I’ and the social role permitted to the ‘I’” (Bedford et al. 2007: 3). Indeed, Margaret Hoby let her chaplain Master Rhodes read her “journall” on a regular basis (see Seelig 2006: 28). John Evelyn inscribes his diary to a progeny to come and wrote with the knowledge that his diary would be read after his death (ibid.). This practice of circulating the diary (rather than keeping it private) did not wane until the eighteenth century. James Boswell and Frances Burney distributed at least some of their entries to audiences they trusted (such as friends or family, see Sherman 1996: 282–283: FN 15). As a

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consequence, such audiences (implicit or explicit) would mark the diary on a psycho-affective level and are likely to have left their traces in the text. In her seminal study of early modern women’s autobiographical writing, Sara Heller Mendelson gives evidence that some manuscripts by early women diarists were burnt after the death of their authors, sometimes also according to their own wishes (1985: 184). Furthermore, she notes that many women diarists used their own shorthand system, so that the contents of the diary would be kept secret (ibid.). In a cultural climate in which the norm of women as “chaste, obedient and silent” (Hull 1982) was “pervasive” (Tancke 2010: 7) and women who breached the rule were portrayed as “sexually incontinent” (ibid.), secrecy may have begun to emerge as a solution to the imperative of women’s silence. The next chapter will explore how the diary could move from addressing an actual (if small) audience to constructing a silent listener figure. For whom did diarists record their daily chores, the routines of their everyday life, their prayers, and their spiritual anxieties? How could the diary become a “release valve for tensions” (my translation, Gruber 2008: 57) at a time that did not encourage emotional self-expression, particularly not in women? What are the implications of the early modern diarists’ “obdurate silence” on matters of “absorbing interest” to the contemporary autobiographer (Shuger 2000: 64)? How can we address the phenomenon that the “search for confirming correlations with scriptural models tended to be prolonged and agonizing, marked by great periods of psychic distress and even suicidal despair” (Lynch 2012: 7) without projecting contemporary notions of agnostic scepticism into the past? These are thorny questions, and they can only be answered approximatively. I am convinced that psychoanalysis provides a critical idiom to refine these questions and engage in a process of approximation and careful speculation (see Marshall 2005). Psychoanalysis has a long tradition of addressing silences and reading for affect while moving back and forth between empathy and scepticism. If not applied too mechanically, and if brought into dialogue with historicist criticism, psychoanalysis can be a very fruitful reading strategy to address the diary’s ideological rigidity, but also the possibilities it held for the early modern writer.

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References Abbott, Porter H. (2008) “Diary.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Eds. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. London: Routledge. 106–107. Alber, Jan (2013) “Unnatural Narrative Theory: The Systematic Study of Anti-­ Mimeticism.” Literature Compass 10.5: 449–460. Bedford, Ronald, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly (2007) Early Modern English Lives: Autobiography and Self-Representation 1500–1660. Aldershot: Ashgate. Blodgett, Harriet (1988) Centuries of Female Days: English Women’s Private Diaries. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Carr, David (1991) “Discussion: Ricoeur on Narrative.” On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation. Ed. David Wood. London: Routledge. 160–171. Cohn, Dorrit (1978) Transparent Minds. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Contzen, von Eva (2018) “Experience, Affect, and Literary Lists.” Partial Answers 16:2. 315–327. Cottam, Rachel (2001) “Diaries and Journals: General Survey.” The Encyclopedia of Life Writing. Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. Ed. Margareta Jolly. London: Fitzroy Dearborn. 267–269. De Man, Paul (1979) “Autobiography as De-Facement.” Modern Language Notes 94: 919–930. Doll, Dan, and Jessica Munns (2006) Recording and Reordering: Essays on the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Diary and Journal. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Fludernik, Monika (1996) Towards a “Natural” Narratology. London: Routledge. Genette, Gérard (1980) Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Print. ——— (1993) “Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative.” Fiction and Diction. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 54–85. Greenblatt, Stephen (1980) Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Gruber, Sabine (2008) Das Tagebuch: ein Medium der Selbstreflexion. Mainz: Dr.-Ing.-Hans-Joachim-Lenz-Stiftung. Gusdorf, George (1980) “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography.” Trans. James Olney. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 28–48. Herman, David (2009) Basic Elements of Narrative. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Hindmarsh, D.  Bruce (2005) The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hull, Suzanne W. (1982) Chaste, Silent and Obedient. San Marino: Huntington. Kermode, Frank (1967) The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Kunin, Aaron (2004) “Other Hands in Pepys’s Diary.” Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History 65.2: 195–219. Lanser, Susan (2005) “The ‘I’ of the Beholder: Equivocal Attachments and the Limits of Structuralist Narratology.” A Companion to Narrative Theory. Eds. James Phelan and Paul Rabinowitz. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 206–219. Lejeune, Philippe (1989) On Autobiography. Ed. John Eakin. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ——— (2009) On Diary. Ed. Jeremy E. Pomkin and Julie Rak. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. Lynch, Kathleen (2012) Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century Anglophone World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacFarlane, Alan (1976) “Introduction.” The Diary of Ralph Josselin. An Essay in Historical Anthropology. Ed. Alan MacFarlane. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Xix–xxvi. Marcus, Laura (2018) Autobiography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marshall, Cynthia (2005) “Extra-Mural Psychoanalysis.” Shakespeare Studies 33: 51–56. Mendelson Heller, Sara (1985) “Stuart’s Women’s Diaries and Occasional Memoirs.” Women in English Society, 1500–1800. Ed. Mary Prior. London and New York: Methuen. 181–210. Nussbaum, Felicity (1988) “Towards Conceptualizing Diary.” Studies in Autobiography: Essays from the International Symposium on Autobiography and Autobiography Studies, Held at Louisiana State University in March 1985. Ed. James Olney. New York: Oxford University Press. 128–140. ——— (1989) The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-­ Century England. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ożarska, Magdalena (2013) Lacework or Mirror? Diary Poetics of Frances Burney, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Ricoeur, Paul (1984) Time and Narrative. Vol. 1. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ——— (1991a) “Life in Quest of Narrative.” On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation. Ed. David Wood. London: Routledge. 20–33. ——— (1991b) “Narrative Identity.” On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation. Ed. David Wood. London: Routledge. 188–199. Seelig, Sharon Cadman (2006) Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women’s Lives, 1600–1680. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sherman, Stuart P. (1996) Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Shuger, Deborah (2000) “Life-Writing in Seventeenth Century England.” Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism. Eds. Patrick Coleman, Jayne Lewis, and Jill Kowalik. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 63–78. Simms, Karl (2003) Paul Ricoeur. Routledge Critical Thinkers. London and New York: Routledge. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson (2010) Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Stanzel, Franz K. (1986) A Theory of Narrative. Trans. Charlotte Goeschde. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Straub, Jürgen (2012) “Identität.” Handbuch der Kulturphilosophie. Ed. Ralf Konersmann. Stuttgart: Metzler. 334–339. Tancke, Ulrike (2010) “Bethinke Thy Selfe.” Early Modern England: Writing Women’s Identities. Amsterdam: Rodopi. White, Hayden (1987) The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

CHAPTER 3

The Diary as Cultural Practice

The use of psychoanalytical approaches in the study of early modern culture is no longer as provocative as it used to be, but the frequent charges of anachronism still need to be addressed, if briefly. Stephen Greenblatt, in his “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture”, argued forcefully that psychoanalytic approaches to early modern cultures were “crippled” because “proprietary rights to the self” (1986: 216) had not been established nor secured in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The birth of psychoanalysis was bound to the nuclear family, child-rearing practices, and educational conventions, which were connected to the rise of capitalism and bourgeois culture. Thus, for Greenblatt, psychoanalysis marks the end of a development which may well have started in the sixteenth century but was far from being completed at that point of time. Greenblatt’s critique led to a marginalisation of psychoanalytic approaches in early modern studies (see Belsey 2008). It is ironic that Greenblatt himself observes a decentring of the subject—a dialectics between individual assertions of power and violent assaults on the individual will (Greenblatt 1980: 1–2), processes that are extremely suggestive of the subversion of the subject as analysed by Lacan—while he remains chary of psychoanalysis as a method. Psychoanalysis, if read carefully, actually addresses many issues that are pertinent for historicist criticism. Concomitantly, there has been a “rapprochement” (Bellamy 2010: 318) between psychoanalysis and early modern literary studies  (see, for instance, Finucci and Schwartz 1994; Mazzio and Trevor 2000; Pye 2000; Skura 2000). Like historicism, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Nandi, Reading the Early Modern English Diary, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42327-8_3

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psychoanalysis is concerned with the problem of “Nachträglichkeit” (“belatedness”) and thus offers a nuanced view on memory and self-­ narrative (on “Nachträglichkeit” see, for instance, LaCapra 1987). More crucially for this study, early psychoanalytic anthropologies, most notably Freud’s later work on culture, overlap conspicuously with radical Protestant thought. Freud locates the subject in an Augustinian world of exile and loss. Like the sinners in Augustine and Calvin, “people are no longer at one with themselves” (Belsey 2008: 20) in psychoanalytic thought. In Freud’s later work as well as in Calvin, we can observe a strong sense of pessimism with respect to man’s capacities for self-improvement. My primary aim is not so much to historicise psychoanalysis as a method or to tease out the crypto-theological language of psychoanalysis, even though this may well be one of the implications of such an endeavour (see Miller 2010). Instead, this chapter focusses on early modern knowledge about the psyche as articulated in the diary and its theological metadiscourses. Thus, my use of psychoanalytic criticism is not thematic—I do not wish to “diagnose” individual early modern writers—but textual. Rather than psychoanalysing individual authors, I set out to explore the verbal structures of early modern diary discourses, the languages of feeling that were available at the time, and the theories of affect regulation that were circulating in early modern thought. For this reason, this chapter begins with an outline of the historical-­ material contexts for diary-writing. The main focus will be on tracts  or metadiscourses of self-examination. I will then move on to discuss to what extent early modern models of piety, interiority, and affectivity resonate with psychoanalytic models of the self. My main aim is to investigate how the diary could become a medium for emotional self-expression, when affect-control (rather than expression) was the ideal of early modern moral thought. The chapter thus sets out to explore how the diary could become a form of writing that is “object-seeking” (Kahane 1992: 284) in the psychoanalytic sense, that is, a writing practice in search of a silent listener-­ figure, a witness, and a benevolent “environment” (Winnicott 1970) for self-expression.

Mapping the Historical Terrain Early modern religious thought was one of the central sources for the emergence and spread of the diary as a genre of life writing, though obviously not the only one. Adam Smyth, in his study of early modern

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almanacs (2010: 15–56) and account books (ibid.: 57–122), suggests parallels between the origins of life writing and the proliferation of modern economic practices such as book-keeping. It is no coincidence that Samuel Pepys, easily the most famous early modern diarist, is also one of the most successful accountants in British history. This parallels Anne Clifford’s “business acumen and training” (ibid.: 76), which can be observed in her account books that survive in the Cumbria Record Office (WD/Hoth/ A988/17, see Smyth 2010: 75). As Adam Smyth demonstrates, diarists borrowed from the textual forms of the account book: the layout on the pages of early modern diaries frequently mimics the form of the annotated almanac. Like the almanac, some early modern diaries, such as John Evelyn’s diary, feature a lengthy passage on the right-hand side and commentaries (probably added later on) on the left-hand side (Smyth 2010: 89). Another crucial factor in the development of the diary was the emergence and the spread of the mechanical clock in the mid-seventeenth century (see Sherman 1996). Before that, methods of chronography had been unreliable (Stern 2015). Time was commonly told by sundial, an instrument that obviously depended on the weather and could not be used in domestic spaces (Stern 2015: 9). Sandglasses and hourglasses were the most commonly used instrument for measuring time in domestic spaces (see Stern 2015: 3). They consisted of two round bulbs that were connected by a narrow “neck” (ibid.) and filled with sand or iron fillings. The sand would flow from the top bulb into the lower bulb within an hour or half an hour, depending on the size of the bulbs. However, hourglasses were also regarded with scepticism, since handling them could easily manipulate the measured time (Stern 2015: 5). Even when they were handled accurately, hourglasses were unreliable because the “two lobes, separately made by glassblower, would not be entirely equal; the central seals, made of leather or string, would weaken and leak; their sand, statically charged by tumbling, or dampened by moisture, would clump” (2015: 4). What is more, hourglasses could not provide collective reference points of time. The only option that provided a common reference point was clocks that were attached to churches and palaces. In the first half of the fourteenth century, we find references to mechanical clocks in Italy, but these were, as Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum suggests, “prestige object[s]” (1996: 128) for a small elite. In the fourteenth century, clock towers were erected all over Italy as well as in the south of France and the Netherlands (ibid.: 131–136). They gradually became an “urban accessory” (ibid.: 125) in

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the Renaissance city. In the process, we can witness the development of a “market time”, that is, the creation of a synchronised global marketplace which spreads from the Italian city states to the rest of the world in the course of the Renaissance (Bedford et al. 2007: 42). However, mechanical clocks were “less accurate than any other kind of time measure”, as Tiffany Stern explains, because they had to be wound and would often unwind too quickly or too slowly if left unwound for too long (2015: 14). Only in 1656, when Christiaan Huygens invented the pendulum regulator did clocks become more reliable (ibid.; see also Dohrn-van Rossum 1996). Huygens’s innovation in chronometry entailed that minutes could be counted reliably and time could gradually become a collective point of reference in the course of the seventeenth century (Sherman 1996: 2). By the late seventeenth century, chamber clocks were common among households of the social elite in England (Glennie and Thrift 2011: 163). In its narrative form, the diary echoes and mirrors the growing awareness of time. Time and its proper uses were also a central theme in pamphlets and religious tracts on idleness. In his Treatise on Vocations, William Perkins (1558–1602), a “bestselling religious author” (Collinson, Hunt, and Walsham 1998: 30) in his time, directs a diatribe against beggars and vagabonds, whom he considers to be harmful for the commonwealth. Luke Rochfort, in his Antidot for lazinesse (1624), similarly stresses the evils of idleness. Hence, “the elect […] were not found among the idle” (Morgan 1988: 147). Making proper use of one’s time was endowed with spiritual value, and conversely, “wasting time”—in idleness, drink, or other morally dubious activities—was viewed as sinful. Intriguingly, reformist divines recommended keeping a log or recording one’s behaviour to bridle the human proclivity for laziness. Getting up early, working hard, and praying devoutly were viewed as the key characteristics of a proper, godly usage of time. The diary served as a medium for such early time-management practices, like the Filofax in the 1990s, and self-help apps today. From the late Elizabethan era onwards, practical guidebooks or manuals on the art of self-examination and diary-keeping emerged and became popular among the dissenting sects (see Rippl 1998: 40). Richard Rogers’s Seven Treatises (1604) was one of the first practical guides to a pious life and one of the first “how-to” toolkits on diary-keeping. Rogers’s guidebook went through six editions between 1603 and 1630 and had a tremendous impact on the first generations of English reformists (see Collinson et al. 1998: 42). In it, he suggests a rigorous routine for each

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day, in the form of a “check-list” that Christians could go through during their day. This list entails not only pious behaviour (such as getting up early) but also a guarded, watchful inwardness:  1.  That we keep a narrow watch over our hearts, words, and deeds continually.   2. That with all care the time be redeemed, which hath been idly, carelessly, and unprofitably spent.   3. That once in the day at the least, private prayer and meditation […]   5. That our family be with diligence and regard, instructed, watched over and governed.   8. That we give not the least bridle to wandering lusts and affections. […] 10. That we bestow sometime not only in mourning for our own sins, but also for the sins of the time and age wherein we live. […] 14. That we read somewhat daily of the Holy Scriptures. (Rogers 1610, qtd. in Bremer 2009: 55)

Rogers emphasises rigorous pious practice and performance, such as reserving a time during the day for religious exercise while also stressing the importance of introspection, of keeping “a narrow watch over hearts, words, and deeds continually”. Rogers thus pictures the diary both as a medium that turns inwards, that is, that helps the subject in his battle against his own susceptibility to “wandering lusts and affections”, and as a means to bridle and habituate the subject’s outward behaviour and to avoid idleness. Furthermore, Seven Treatises also develops the temporal format that would become defining for the diary—the Christian diary is a daily, repetitive, and curiously circular form. The battle against human predisposition to idleness and “wandering lusts” is never over, but it has to be resumed again and again, every day. The verbal texture of Rogers’s book echoes and underlines its content, as its rhetorical manoeuvres rest on repetition: the anaphoric repetition of the conjunction “that” highlights the urgency of his claim. Adverbs such as “continually” and “daily” further stress the importance of repetition of habituation. In this vein, the sentences also follow each other in neat parallelisms, giving Rogers’s treatise a hammering rhythm. In contrasting the “care”, “diligence”, and “regard” with which the profitable life is spent with the “idleness” and “wandering lust” of the reprobate, Rogers further emphasises the importance of constant, daily self-scrutiny and habituation. Thus, the diary is constructed not just as an instrument for “redeem[ing]”

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time past, but also as a medium which looks into the future, as a medium designed to assist the pious Christian in his struggle to live a godly life. Such a complex temporality and affectivity also marks William Perkins’s tracts on self-examination. Perkins (1558–1602), who was one of the most widely read Protestant divines, is more explicit in his comparison of account books and self-examination (see also Lamb 1999: 66) as he recommends keeping “bills of receipt [of] graces, blessings and gifts” and “bills of expenses” to “redeem […] time profitably or wastefully spent” (1970: 474). He is also conspicuously concerned with a specific inwardness and watchfulness that he associates with those guided by God’s providence. In his Discourse of Conscience (1596), Perkins identifies individual conscience as “‘a little god’ placed within one’s heart by the Creator to ‘arraign’ one in life as one will be arraigned finally at the Last Judgement” (qtd. in Malone 2003: 224). The Essex minister John Beadle followed Perkins’s lead in 1656, publishing an extended version of a sermon he had preached in 1644, in which he recommends diary-keeping as a means of developing a watchful self and thus as an instrument to bridle passions, sin, and idleness. Like Perkins, he relies on a mercantile rhetoric, using images stemming from trade, administration, and accounting: We have our State Diurnals, relating the National affaires. Tradesmen keep their shop books. Merchants their Accompt books. Lawyers have their books of presidents. Physitians their Experiments. Some wary husbands have kept a Diary of dayly disbursements. Travellers a Journall of all they have seen, and hath befallen them in their way. A Christian that would be exact hath more need, and may reap much more good by such a Journall as this. We are all but Stewards, Factors here, and must give a strict account in that great day to the high Lord of all our ways, and of all his ways towards us. (Beadle 1656, qtd. in MacFarlane 1970: 7)

In an ingenious rhetorical move, Beadle here makes a case for the diary as a pious practice and a pious textual genre. He starts with a list of other established genres, which are, as he suggests, generally considered to be useful and legitimate. His “punchline” is that the good Christian may also benefit from such a spiritual account book or “Journall” and “reap much more good” from it than the merchants, lawyers, and physicians, who in their busy toil may forget their religious duties. Having thus defended the

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“Journall” as a pious genre, Beadle continues with some 184 pages in which he introduces the art of self-examination. John Featley’s A Fountain of Tears (1683) is probably the most detailed practical manual of diary-keeping. It includes a list of 38 questions that Christians could put to themselves before going to bed, thus scrutinising their daily activities: 1. At what time…did I arise from my bed? 2. What first did I? 3. How devoutly prayed I? 4. What Scriptures read I? (qtd. in Mendelson 1985: 186) In Featley’s, Rogers’s, and Beadle’s meta-theories of the diary, the genre appears to be a “spiritual balance sheet” (to use Sara Heller Mendelson’s formulation), in which the events of the day are fitted into a “godly straightjacket” (Mendelson 1985: 185). The early modern diary observes and records such “godly” uses of time and pious self-examination.

Emotions in Early Modern Moral Thought In an age in which authentic emotional self-expression has become a trope, the hostility towards the “passions” so prevalent in early modern thought is puzzling. Early modern scepticism towards emotions is encapsulated in the allegory of “psychomachia”, in which the soul is depicted as a “battlefield” between reason and the passions (Tilmouth 2007: 16; see also Paster, Rowe, and Floyd-Wilson 2004). Taking up classical models (most notably Plato’s Phaedo and Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations), Erasmus of Rotterdam allegorically describes passion as an army of foreign intruders, as enemies that cannot be vanquished: the passions will rise up again as soon as they are defeated. Reason’s rule over the passions is always ephemeral and temporal, never definite (ibid.). The battle between passions and reasons—“psychomachia”—is an open-ended process, which only stops when we die. The task of the cultivated humanist is to constantly restrain his passionate impulses. Spenser’s sonnet, “I on my horse”, in which the young knight is ruled by his passions (embodied by the horse), is a particularly colourful illustration of the psychomachic battle between reason and emotions (Tilmouth 2007: 40–74; see also James 1997: 1). While Neo-Stoic traditions centred on hostility towards the passions, neo-Aristotelian models in the seventeenth century would break with the

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hierarchy between reason and passion, at least in some respects. As Christopher Tilmouth has shown, Aristotelian models of affect suggest that our desires, appetites, and emotions can work as positive forces (e.g. without fear, a soldier might be tempted to act rashly on the battlefield). Thus, cultivating a certain amount of fear and balancing it against courage and bravery is the key to “wise” decisions (see Tilmouth 2007: 20–21). The most prominent example of early modern Aristotelianism is Thomas Wright, whose treatise, Passions of the Minde in Generall (1601), was widely read (Müller 2004: 55). Wright was a protégé of Henry Wriothesley, the third Earl of Southampton, best known as one of the possible identities of the “W.H.” praised in Shakespeare’s sonnets. Born into a Catholic family, Wright is renowned for his recusancy (Müller 2004: 56–57). Passions of the Minde in Generall is a hybrid text which defies disciplinary and generic boundaries. It is a study of moral philosophy and rhetoric, of national mentalities, and of a medical theory of emotions. Wright starts by distinguishing the English from other nations with a series of rhetorical questions in which he demonstrates the moral and intellectual superiority of the English. He ends his introduction with a surprising turn—or maybe even “anticlimax” (ibid.: 59)—suggesting that despite these obvious achievements, “our nation is accounted simply and unwise by divers others” (Wright 1976: 81, 120–121). His point is that the Italians and the Spanish know more about the passions than the English (even if the latter are more knowledgeable in all other respects). Consequently, the English are more easily manipulated by the more cunning Southern “races”. Wright concludes that the English need to learn more about emotions and thus provides the rationale for his own book (see Müller 2004: 60). Wright’s treatise departs from the Erasmic model, as it no longer pictures the passions as detrimental forces that should be outwitted or even annihilated. He clarifies that passions are not to be “extinguished” but may grant us a “much-needed impulsive power” (Tilmouth 2007: 21) to behave morally. Reason alone, according to Wright’s Aristotelian formula, is “very feeble […] like a shipmaister without winde” (Wright 1971: 17). Characteristically, Wright’s treatise espouses a certain optimism with respect to the human capacity for understanding and self-improvements. Reformist theories of feeling and affect control are much more pessimistic and rely on different anthropological assumptions.

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Languages of Feeling in Reformist Thought The equestrian allegory of self-governance so prominent in humanist writings did not fade Reformation thought—Martin Luther’s servo arbitrio (“On the Bondage of the Will”) compares the human will to a packhorse (“Lasttier”)—but he no longer shares the dream of self-improvement: Thus, the human will is placed, as a sort of packhorse, in the midst of two contending parties. If God hath mounted, it wills and goes whither God pleases […]. If Satan hath mounted, it wills and goes whither Satan wills. Nor is it in its own choice, to which of the two riders it shall run. (Luther 1823: 69)

Luther’s simile rebuts earlier humanist notions, most notably Erasmus of Rotterdam’s On Free Will, arguing that mankind has been drawn to evil ever since the Fall. Original sin hinders self-improvement and increased closeness to God. For Luther, there is truly little human agency. Instead, in Luther’s analogy, human will is the “horse”, a passive “beast of burden”, while the “rider” is the metaphysical force of either good or evil. Intriguingly, the equestrian imagery employed by Luther and Spenser survives in Freud’s metapsychology. In it, he divides the psyche into three irreconcilable parts: the psyche consists of unruly instincts (which he calls “id”), a stern ethical instance (the super-ego), and cognitive faculties (the “ego”). Freud’s point is that the “ego” has to constantly find a balance between the impulses of the “id”, the (sometimes impossible) demands of the super-ego, and the constraints reality imposes upon the subject. Partly echoing the Protestant idea of the depravity of the soul, he argues that the ego, more often than not, fails to achieve this balance. According to Freud, the “id” keeps getting the better of the “ego” and finds ways to articulate and satisfy its untamed desires. To explain and illustrate his point, he uses an equestrian allegory that resonates strongly with Spenser and Luther: One might compare the relations of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse. The horse provides the locomotive energy, and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it. But all too often, in the relations between the ego and the id, we find a picture of the less ideal situation, in which the rider is obliged to guide his horse in the direction, in which it itself wants to go. (Freud 1933: 77)

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In Freud’s allegory, the roles of rider and horse are reversed: the horse (standing for the body and its passions) is depicted as strong and unruly, while the rider is weak and physically inferior to the horse. Freud suggests that the “id” (passionate impulses and desires, symbolised by “the horse”) is also a source of strength and “energy” for us, but it needs to be moderated and steered reasonably. Since the “ego” (“the rider”) is weaker than the “id” (“the horse”), this is no easy task. Albeit from different directions, both texts embrace a similar anthropological assumption: both Luther and Freud underscore the importance of instincts, passions, and desires in the psyche. Reason and cognition play merely a minor part in their respective notions of human nature, as the cognitive self is easily outwitted by its own animal instincts. Like his unlikely Protestant predecessors, Freud places little hope in human agency and famously concludes “the self is not master in his own house” (“das Ich ist nicht Herr im Hause”, ibid.: 83). Arguably, Freud would regard Luther’s God as an “introject” of the super-ego, as the imaginary personification of social norms. In Freud’s view, religious constraints inhibit self-growth. However, his anti-religious gestures only thinly veil the large affinities between his and Luther’s language and imagery. Freud’s tacit assumption that the rational ego needs to tame the wild “horse” finds an overwhelming “solidarity” (Gestrich 1989: 11) among theologians. For Freud—as for reformers like Luther—constant vigilance and self-examination are both necessary and futile. Neither Freud nor Luther suggests that self-monitoring is a way of redeeming or “sav[ing]” oneself.

Calvinism in England The moral pessimism we find in Luther’s theology is even more pronounced in the thought of John Calvin (1509–1564) and his English interpreters William Perkins and William Fenner (1600–1640). Indeed, for Calvin, psychomachia is an impossibility because reason is part of the soul and the human soul has been depraved ever since the Fall. Calvin’s doctrine of predestination famously entails that God chooses to save but a few believers, although they may well be “unworthy” of his love (Vorster 2010: 79). According to Calvin, the subject has very little agency, although, paradoxically, it is responsible for its bad deeds. Yet, there are certain ways in which believers can discern whether God has chosen to save them. Famously, a predisposition for hard work and self-discipline

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was signs of God’s grace. Moreover, feeling intense pangs of guilt and self-­ loathing could be read as divine interventions: For, as a veritable world of miseries is to be found in mankind, and we are thereby despoiled of divine raiment, our shameful nakedness exposes a teeming horde of infamies. Each of us must, then, be so stung by the consciousness of his own unhappiness as to attain at least some knowledge of God. Thus, from the feeling of our own ignorance, vanity, poverty, infirmity, and—what is more—depravity and corruption, we recognize that the true light of wisdom, sound virtue, full abundance of every good, and purity of righteousness rest in the Lord alone. (Institutes: 1.1.1)

Calvin uses a cascade of negative attributes to describe human life. It is associated with “poverty” and “misery”, “depravity” and “corruption”, which he juxtaposes with the “abundance”, “the light of wisdom”, and the “purity of righteousness” of the Lord. The lure and appeal of Calvin’s thought might have been the promise of abundance in an age of dearth and poverty. Furthermore, he also provides a practical piece of advice in an otherwise abstract theological tract: we need only look inward to be “stung” by the realisation of our own “unhappiness” and thus gain some knowledge about divine grace. It is the “feeling of our own ignorance” that gives us a sense of God’s greatness, and thus, paradoxically as it might seem, a sense of being part of the small group of the elect. Calvin’s impact on the development of dissenting ideologies vis-à-vis self-monitoring can hardly be overstated (see, for instance, Bremer and Webster 2006; Coffey and Lim 2008; and Collinson 1983). Like Calvin several decades earlier, William Perkins correlates inner feelings of guilt with divine grace as he suggests that the unpleasant sense of being depraved and inadequate is a sign of God’s grace and approaching salvation: “therefore men, the more they feele their inwards corruption, the more grace they haue” (Perkins 1631: 567, qtd. in Tilmouth 2007: 35). Richard Rogers argues that the elect few are prone to thinking “more vily” of themselves “than any other can doe” (Rogers 1604: 10). Richard Greenham (1535–1584), a minister whose work the diarist Margaret Hoby read and copied on a regular basis, suggests that the best way to probe one’s own state of election is to observe one’s feelings. For “the godly man”, there must be an emotional connection between the rational realisation of the fact “I am a sinner” and the feeling of guilt and self-­ loathing that comes with it. Guilt may give rise to an impulse to annihilate

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that part of the self which continues to have sinful desires. According to dissenting ideology, the elect have to feel their inadequacy. The cognitive realisation of having done wrong is not sufficient (Tilmouth 2007: 35). In this context, the diary serves an important purpose in the devout attempt to distinguish such godly feelings from unsavoury ones. It not only documents the believer’s struggle to discern God’s will but also encourages the subject to pray devoutly and to search the soul for sins and dangerous passions. The importance of diary-keeping is particularly emphasised in the work of Isaac Ambrose (1591–1664), whose teachings were highly appreciated by the diarist Ralph Josselin (MacFarlane 1970: 6–7). Ambrose constructs the diary as a means of communicating with God: 1. Hereby he [the diarist] observes something of God to his soul, and of his soul to God. 2. Upon occasion he pours out his soul to God in prayer accordingly, and either is humbled or thankful. 3. He considers how it is with him in respect of time past, and if he had profited, in grace, to find out the means whereby he hath profited, that he may make more constant use of such means; or wherein he hath decayed, to observe by what temptation he was overcome, that his former errors may make him more wary of the future. (1674: 118, qtd. in ibid.: 7) Ambrose stresses that diaries can be helpful in the attempt to find “something of God” in the soul (ibid.). In the process, the diarist may discover that she or he was “overcome” by “temptation” in the past and is thus incited to take more heed in the future. Looking back on the events of a particular day, the diarist is reminded to restrain himself on days to come. The spiritual journal is therefore not simply a record of the past but a cultural practice that shapes the life of the writer.

The Depravity of the Soul: Diaries and Super-Egos From a psychoanalytic angle, there would be much to say about the language and imagery of radical Protestant theology, about the masochistic image of the good Christian in Greenham and Rogers, or about the scatological language with which the soul is described (as a “filthie sinkehole”, Perkins qtd. in Tilmouth 2007: 34). However, a wider, less thematic, and

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more historically sensitive approach is actually germane to the cultural alterity of the early modern era. Furthermore, psychoanalysis itself needs to be read against its own cultural backdrop. Freud wrote his major work on psychoanalysis and culture, Civilization and Its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur; 1930), when his native Vienna transformed into a murderous, fascist nightmare. The historical context might explain why Freud projects an anthropology of what Calvin would call “utter depravity” in Civilization and Its Discontents. For Freud, the biblical command to “love thy neighbor” was necessary precisely because it is not at all in line with our psychological constitution: Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved […] they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggression. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and kill him. (2004: 110–111)

The passage concludes with Thomas Hobbes’s phrase homo homini lupus, thus once more looking to the early modern period for reference. In Freud’s reading of Hobbes, human beings are instinctually drawn to violence, (sexual) exploitation, and war. Morality, law, and religion only thinly veil the deeper desires to transgress social norms. On a more theoretical level, Freud develops a new model of the “psychic apparatus” (“psychischer Apparat”), offering a psychological genealogy of the moral depravity, which he considers an integral part of human nature. For Freud, the human mind is not just divided into unconscious and conscious aspects, but the unconscious itself is split. As I suggested earlier, Freud argues that the psyche is torn between different kinds of wishes (“Wünsche”), for instance, between the wish to submit to aggressive impulses and the wish to conform to social norms (Freud 2004: 98–103). For Freud, every person has irredeemable anti-social urges (which he calls “the death drive” or “Todestrieb” in German, ibid.) that “press blindly for satisfaction” (de Berg 2003: 58), and there is very little that can be done about this. In Freud’s view, the “death drive” is innate. The existence of a super-ego, the part of the psyche which comprises

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values and norms, does not actually alleviate the problem of what Freud considers to be our innate aggressiveness. On the contrary, the super-ego can develop self-destructive powers which result in even greater aggressive impulses. This is because the super-ego is not identical with the conscious ethical framework of a subject. Rather, the super-ego is an unconscious, irrational part of the self. It is the site of tormenting feelings of guilt and shame, of aggressive self-loathing, and, hence, of emotions that are so terrible they have to remain unconscious. According to Freud, “the normal man is far more immoral than he believes but also far more moral than he knows” (1991: 393). The super-ego emerges when the child develops a primary sense of guilt. The child realises, for instance, that the parents disapprove of certain conduct (like taking a cookie from the cookie jar without asking), while they approve of others (politely asking for a cookie). As the child is dependent on her parents’ love, she will try to do only the things that please the parents and avoid those which do not (Freud 2010: 107). In the process, the child gradually develops a normative framework on her own, which is stricter than the rules and norms endorsed by her actual parents. Freud terms this process “introjection” (“Introjektion”, 1924: 399) rather than internalisation (“Verinnerlichung”), denoting that the super-ego is irrational rather than realistic. The crucial element in the formation of super-ego is the fear of losing parental love and protection, a fear that is almost unbearable for the child (2010: 108). Without parental care, the child would indeed be entirely helpless, as Freud explains, and for this reason, the super-ego constantly “torments the sinful ego with […] feelings of dread and watches for opportunities whereby the outer world can be made to punish it” (ibid.). Children thus develop two interrelated anxieties that shape their behaviour, attitudes, and identity: first, the fear of losing parental love, thus resulting in a fear of authority; and second, they learn to be afraid of their own super-ego (Freud 2010: 108). In Freud’s view, these anxieties do not fade if a person complies with social norms. On the contrary, “the more righteous a man is the stricter and more suspicious will his conscience be” (2010: 109). The “renunciation of instincts” (“Triebverzicht”) does not lead to a disappearance of the drive itself, and often, it can even intensify a subject’s longing to do something “forbidden”. As Freud suggests in Civilization, Society, and Religion, “for most people there is a limit beyond which their constitution cannot comply with the demands of civilization” (1987: 43).

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Freud’s theory of the super-ego may serve as a useful tool for interpreting the vaster cultural significance of the diary. For one, his pessimistic anthropology significantly overlaps with Calvinist thought. Both Freud and his Protestant predecessors point to an anthropology of “utter depravity”, even though Freud, ironically, appears more forgiving than his pious predecessors. Furthermore, Freud does not share the humanist dream of rational self-governance. Self-monitoring only helps to raise a bit of self-­ awareness; it will not grant the subject any more self-control. Diary-writing is a means of surveillance, a way of “keep[ing] a narrow watch” (Rogers 1604 qtd. in Bremer 2009: 55) over one’s deeds and thoughts. However, and here the practice echoes Freud’s concept of the super-ego, it does not endow the diarist with agency. The diary and the super-ego do not merely register the deeds of its author, but they also stand as reminders to actually perform deeds that are morally acceptable, to make godly use of time, to contemplate one’s every move, and to scrutinise every single thought. As a cultural practice, diary-writing has direct repercussions on how a person should lead her life, view herself, and attend to her innermost feelings. It turns the subject inside out as it were, making public every intimate thought and revealing everything that was hidden. In this sense, diary-writing goes deeper into the subject and infiltrates the subject on a subtler, “subcutaneous” level than Foucault’s apparatuses of power. What is more, Freud’s theory of the super-ego ties in with an odd ambiguity in Calvinist thought: the diarist knows that he is fighting a losing battle against his “depraved” impulses. Pious diarists are aware that they will sin and repent, sin and repent repeatedly, and that they can only be saved from this vicious circle through divine intervention. In a similar vein, the super-ego knows that the id will rebel against the norms that the super-ego imposes upon him. The inner battle between super-ego and id never actually ceases. For this reason, the early modern diary is certainly a “technology of the self” (to use the Foucauldian term) in the seventeenth century; however, it is also highly ambivalent and not very “efficient”. The self that is produced on the pages of the diary is not in control of anything—certainly not of his unruly passions—and, intriguingly, the diarist knows this. Therefore, the reformist subject is split between a self that tries to replicate God’s gaze (Freud would call it the “super-ego”) and a self which fails to obey (Freud would call this part of the self the “id”). Like the psychic instance Freud calls the “super-ego”, the diary has the purpose of

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bridling the diarist’s predisposition to “sin”, while the diarist knows well that she or he is fighting a losing battle. It is this awareness that gives the diarist a modicum of comfort. The pressing question of whether one was one of the elect or a reprobate could partly, and paradoxically, be answered by feeling particularly bad about oneself. In an important way, self-­loathing could be seen as a divine purge. In Book III of his Institutes, Calvin emphasises the contradictory character of pious interiority Scripture praises the saints for their forbearance when, so afflicted with harsh misfortune, they do not break or fall; so stabbed with bitterness, they are at the same time flooded with spiritual joy; so pressed by apprehension, they recover their breath, revived by God’s consolation. (Institutes, 3.8.10)

Here, Calvin works with dichotomies to describe the ideal pious subject— the “saint”: “bitterness” merges with “joy”, physical violence (“stabbed”) with recovery. The luring promise of being a Calvinist “saint” makes the austere practice of self-monitoring and of dutifully attempting to follow God’s demands (however futile these attempts may be) not just bearable but potentially also enjoyable.

Pleasure and Pain: A Lacanian Diary Calvin’s ideas, historically distant as they may be, resonate not only with Freud’s theory of culture but also with more recent poststructuralist readings of the subject. In Lacan’s early work on psychosis, he stresses that our sense of self disintegrates into a psychotic state if we foreclose the “Name of Father”, that is, the world of norms and taboos (Lacan 1993). Conversely, for Lacan, the pain of having one’s desire inhibited is also strangely rewarding. In his How to Read Lacan, Slavoj Žižek explains how the super-ego brings about an “obscene” form of enjoyment, which Lacan terms jouissance: Lacan positioned an equation between jouissance and superego: to enjoy is not a matter of following one’s spontaneous tendencies; it is rather something we do as a kind of weird and twisted ethical duty. (2006: 80)

The term is usually left in the French original as to emphasise its equivocal character. Jouissance points to the pleasure that stems from fulfilling “a kind of weird and twisted ethical duty”, and thus, it is precisely not a

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matter of following one’s impulses and enjoying the result. Following Lacan, Žižek suggests that jouissance is connected to the pain of being subjected to a normative system over which we have little or no control. Jouissance occurs in instances when we know fully well that we have developed a bad habit, but yet cannot help it, such as frantically searching the house for our keys when we are already late for work, promising ourselves to never mislay them again (which we will do, of course). According to Lacan, there must be something in this frantic searching the house that we actually enjoy. Otherwise, why would we do it? It is this “something we enjoy” in our bad habits that Lacan’s concept of jouissance points to. Thus, for Lacan, “jouissance est un mal”, while “mal” translates both into “pain” and “evil”. And yet, it is something we cannot avoid. The sarcastic undertone in Žižek’s language and the agnosticism in Lacan’s thought appear to be fundamentally at odds with early modern Reformism. Yet, on closer inspection, there are quite a few overlaps between the tenets of poststructuralist psychoanalysis and the early modern Reformist moral universe. On a general level, Lacan’s insistence on the importance of paternal authority in subject formation is conspicuous. More specifically, Lacan’s imagery of violence, pain, and pleasure strangely echoes the language of early modern Protestant thought. William Perkins, for instance, compares the “godly man” to an escaped “prisoner” whose attempts to comply with God’s demands are doomed as he is still in “clogs” (qtd. in Tilmouth 2007: 36). It is not until God “strikes a deadly wound” (ibid.) to man’s sinfulness that man can walk free. Perkins here echoes Calvin, who, in a chapter called “Bearing the Cross, A Part in Self-Denial”, emphasises that if we obey God only because it is necessary, if we should be allowed to escape, we will cease to obey him. But Scripture bids us contemplate in the will of God something far different: namely, first righteousness and equity, then concern for our own salvation. Of this sort, then, are Christian exhortations to patience. Whether poverty or exile, or prison, or insult, or disease, or bereavement, or anything like them torture us, we must think that none of these things happens except by the will and providence of God, that he does nothing except with a well-ordered justice. What then? Do not our innumerable and daily offenses deserve to be chastised more severely and with heavier rods than the afflictions he lays upon us out of his kindness? Is it not perfectly fair that our flesh be tamed and made accustomed, as it were, to the yoke, lest it lustfully rage according to its own inward nature? Are not God’s right and truth worth our trouble? (Institutes: 3.8.11)

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Calvin pictures the Christian as an obedient, subservient subject that accepts whatever terrible fate, “poverty or exile, or prison, or insult, or disease, or bereavement”, as God’s will. Furthermore, he highlights man’s “daily offenses” which deserve to be “chastise[d]”. The Reformation subject is thus supposed to be patient, dutiful, and grateful in the face of hardship, as they deserve an even more severe punishment (whatever that may be). Put into an idiom that is closer to our own time, we might say that the Reformation subject is constantly acting on “a kind of weird and twisted ethical duty” (Žižek 2006: 79). Another crucial aspect of the subjectivity in Reformation thought is its emphasis on what Cynthia Marshall has termed “self-shattering” (Marshall 2002) rather than self-fashioning. Perkins expresses the imperative to “humble myself, forsake and deny myself” (1970: 382; my emphasis), while the process of “humbl[ing]”, “forsak[ing]”, and “deny[ing]” the self is very much idealised. Although it may be painful, this annihilation of the self is replete with promise of salvation and regeneration and, hence, potentially very pleasurable. The humbled and forsaken self is the self which enjoys in the Lacanian sense.

Self-Reflections: Diaries and Mirrors The English diary evolved in the context of Protestant ideologies of self-­ scrutiny, but of course, not all early modern diaries are pious. It is thus tempting to read a teleological plot into the development of the diary from pious to secular, and to construct texts such as Samuel Pepys’s Diary as emergent narratives on bourgeois subjectivity. As many early modern texts such as Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 62” or Donne’s “The Good Morrow” use images of mirroring and self-reflection, it is very plausible that critics observe “connections among mirrors, autobiography, and self-­representation” (Kelly 2006: 62, see also Grabes 1982; MelchiorBonnet 2001; Shuger 1998). However, as Kelly cautions us, “to regard the mirror as a Burckhardian emblem of pre-modern self-consciousness […] does not exhaust all aspects of the debate about who, or what, ‘the self’ was” (2006: 62). The cultural meanings and uses of the early modern looking glass do not entirely overlap with later meanings of the mirror. With this historicist caveat in mind, the following section will discuss the possible significance of Lacan’s notion of the “mirror stage” for reading the early modern diary. As Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage is by now so familiar to cultural critics that it has almost become a “trope”

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(Schwarz 2000: 272), I will only provide a very short summary before I move on to my discussion. Lacan’s main tenet is that the self is essentially a fiction which we create around the time when we first recognise ourselves in a mirror, usually between 6 and 18 months (2001: 1–2). At that point, the motor capacities of infants are very limited, and they depend entirely on their primary caregiver, usually the mother. According to Lacan, the experience of dependency is deeply frustrating, even terrifying—what would happen if the mother stopped caring for the child? Therefore, the infant starts developing a highly idealised fantasy about its capacities and its powers when it gazes at its specular image. In the process, the child assumes that the self it sees in the mirror (which Lacan calls the moi) has the ability to do all these things, although the self that is gazing into the mirror (which Lacan terms the je) is incapable of doing them (ibid.: 6). Thus, the subject’s moment of recognition is at the same time a mis-recognition, as it projects fantasies of omnipotence onto its specular image: The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation—and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopedic—and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire development. (Ibid.: 4)

In gazing at the mirror, the infant does not find an image of itself that is an essential given but constructs a fiction of the self. If the fiction is broken and the baby realises that it is not the idealised persona it thought it was, it  experiences a terrible sense of fragmentation and disintegration. As a result, the subject needs the “orthopedic” (ibid.: 4) totality of its mirror image or else it ceases to be. Lacan’s theory of the subject has a dual structure. The subject is split at the very moment it constructs its own identity—it is split into the self that gazes into the mirror (the je) and the specular image or the ideal-ego (the moi). The construction of self in diary-writing follows a pattern which appears to resemble the Lacanian scenario in its dual structure. The diurnal self is similarly “split” at the very moment she sets out to write: into a self that writes and a self that is written about. Therefore, one might argue that diary-writing also entails a projection of an ideal-ego, one with all the

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capabilities that the je (the self that is writing) is lacking. Just like the Lacanian je transfixed by its specular image, diarists could also be said to create a certain image of themselves, for instance, as model Christian figures or as model bourgeois “achievers” and “performers”. These identities are, of course, provisional and completely fictitious. The provisional quality of the ideal-ego would also explain why the diarist is left with a never-­ ending process of construction and scrutiny, perpetually reconstructing and then doubting her own narrative mirror image. On a first glance, reading the diary as mirror appears to be very promising. Many early modern diarists such as Margaret Hoby, Richard Rogers, and Elias Ashmole actually had access to mirrors (Kelly 2006: 63), and mirrors are prominent tropes in early modern poems and philosophical texts. In her study The Mirror: A History (2001), Sabine Melchior-Bonnet comments on the possibilities and limitations the mirror held for early modern constructions of self. According to her, “[t]he feeling of selfhood that the mirror awakened was a conflictual one of modesty or shame, consciousness of the body and one’s appearance under the eyes of another” (2001: 140). In a certain way, Melchior-Bonnet’s observations tie in very well with Lacan’s theory, in which the nature of self-reflection similarly appears to be conflictual. However, Melchior-Bonnet also stresses that early modern looking glasses were not associated with concepts of “individual rights” (2001: 139) or autonomy. The narcissistic fascination with the specular image, the fantasy of autonomy and agency so prominent in Lacan’s theory, does not translate into early modern discourses on looking glasses, as the cultural meaning of the early modern mirror differed considerably from Lacan’s mid-twentieth-century context. According to Herbert Grabes (1982) and Deborah Shuger (1998), the early modern mirror is only very rarely conceptualised as an object which creates a self-portrait. The person gazing at the mirror does not see her own reflection in the mirror but something completely different, for instance, “saints, skulls, offspring, spouses, magistrates, Christ”, as Deborah Shuger points out (1998: 37). Early modern mirrors are involved in ethical rather than epistemic procedures, showing a “clear conscience” (Shuger 1998: 34) rather than a transparent consciousness. Furthermore, early mirrors were connected to the occult arts. The famous “magus” John Dee used mirrors to communicate with and conjure up the angels (MacGregor 2014: 72). In this vein, early modern mirrors are contingent and phantasmatic in ways that are potentially even more radical than Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage implies. Furthermore, with the possible

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exception of Samuel Pepys, hardly any seventeenth-century diarist conveys the sense of narcissistic self-love characteristic of the Lacanian subject. As the case studies will illustrate in more detail, the early modern diary does not generally convey the sense that the writer—in a “jubilant assumption” (Lacan 2001: 2) of her or his mirror image—constructs an “illusion of autonomy” (ibid.: 6). Nor does the affective quality of most of the journals analysed in this study point towards a Lacanian subject, which characteristically “greets its mirror image in a flutter of jubilant activity” (ibid.: 1). The early modern diary engenders the possibility of creating an image of the self, but it is never actually an intimate or private image; it is an “image under the eyes of another” (Melchior-Bonnet 2001: 140). Early modern mirrors are social and relational, implying the presence of the gaze from another self. Conversely, vanity and narcissistic self-love are shunned in early modern discourses on mirrors (see Kelly 2006). The solitary figure, the modern individualist, picturing an idealised version of his self, does not translate smoothly into early modern diary discourses. Instead, one of the central themes in all the diaries, pious or secular, is social and family relationships. Early modern diaries typically construct “interpersonal subjectivit[ies]” (Tilmouth 2013: 17) and only very rarely imply a fiction of autonomy and mastery. Thus, I suggest amending the dominant Lacanian paradigm in cultural thought with a less prominent variant of psychoanalytic thought: the object-relations school of psychoanalysis, which places emphasis on the formative role of relationships in individual identity. Object-relations psychoanalysis is more attuned to a cultural climate in which the notion of a full and authentic selfhood hinged on community and relationality rather than on autonomy and independence. Furthermore, it sheds light on the intriguing phenomenon that many early modern diaries actually resonate strongly with contemporary reading practices, although they emerged in a cultural climate that differs greatly from our own. It is the “object-seeking” quality of some early modern diaries that connects them with contemporary writing practices, the sense that the diarist tries to construct a safe “environment” (Winnicott 1970) of tensions and painful emotions, but also for happy memories and moments of joy. Diaries are often regarded as “monological” (Dusini 2005: 67) genres, while the early history of the diary offers compelling reasons to the contrary. As Sabine Gruber points out in her study of German diaries, the genre implies the presence of a benevolent listener—“a future self” or “a fictive companion”, as Sabine Gruber points out (2008: 44; my

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translation). Gruber’s “fictive companion”—a notion which she develops ad hoc, without further elaboration—can be conceptualised in terms of what psychoanalytic theory calls “an object”. The psychoanalytic term “object” was first used by Sigmund Freud who characterises it as the attribute of the infant’s caregiver. It is the first attribute that the child recognises as being outside its own body. For a baby, the first object would be milk or the breast (Freud 1992, see also Akhtar 2009: 192; Burgin 1992: 278). The early relationship of an infant with objects is formative for the rest of its life, and without the reliable presence of objects, the self is shipwrecked in a sea of contingent events. The Freudian object is strongly connected with what he calls “Vorstellung” (1992: 122), which is usually translated as “object-representation” (Akhtar 2009: 192). According to Freud, the baby acquires the capacity to develop inner representations of outer objects. The infant learns that the breast is not part of his own body but part of an external world, which can be present or absent. For Freud, the inner perception is typically “richer and more complex” (ibid.) than the actual object. Thus, the child gradually develops an inner world of fantasy and imagination. Crucially in Freud’s theory, however, the drive is the central movens of the child’s development, not its relationship to the caregiver or object. In contrast to Freud, object relations theory, a psychoanalytic school founded by Melanie Klein and typically associated with British psychoanalysts such as Ronald Fairbairn (1952), Michael Balint (1959), and Harry Guntrip, views the infant’s relationship with the object as the foundational moment in personal development. Klein’s notion of the object still relies on a Freudian and, thus, a relatively unabashed biologistic concept of the drive (see Hinshelwood 1993: 526), although she modifies and qualifies his concept in at least two ways. Klein starts with the Freudian assumption that the object is equivalent to a person (or aspect of a person) that can satisfy the child’s drive. The breast and milk are the first objects of the infant’s desire from its very first days in life. However, Klein observes that, from an infant’s perspective, the object has a variety of qualities: it is nurturing, lively, and loving, but also cold, threatening, and evil—all at the same time. According to Klein, this can be explained in terms of the infant’s motor incapacity and helplessness (1988:  31, 61–63). When the object (“the breast”) is absent, the child experiences not just frustration but also overwhelming fear and rage. Given its dependence on the “breast”, this is quite plausible; without being fed, the child would die and, crucially, it does not yet know that

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“the breast” will always return. To cope with the ambiguity of the situation (the “object” can be absent and cold as well as present and nurturing), the child starts to fantasise that there are two objects: a good object which feeds and cares for the child, and a bad object that withdraws from the infant (31). The infant projects its sadistic and destructive impulses on the “bad object” and continues to love the “good object” (ibid.: 63–64). In the process, she imagines that the bad object will take revenge, and from this the infant can develop paranoia and “persecutory anxiety” (ibid.: 64). Only at the age of six to nine months does the infant gradually develop an understanding of the object’s unity (Klein 1988: 35, 72–73). In this process of integration, the child develops an intense, frightening— but also potentially heartening—inner world. It is important to note here that, for Kleinians, “objects are not people”, as Gregorio Kohon argues in his eponymous essay (1985). The object is a product of “phantasy” (Klein keeps the German spelling), although it has its origins in the actual mother-­ child dyad. In this vein, Klein makes a strong case for an interpersonal concept of the self, a self which is at the same time endowed with a rich interiority. For Klein, the baby never exists in a biological vacuum but is always already entangled in a relational and, hence, social structure. Subjectivity develops in the relationship of the mother-child dyad; it is not the result of a biological drive. Object relations theory holds that the subject is primarily “object-seeking” rather than “pleasure seeking” or drive-discharging (Kahane 1992: 284; Fairbairn 1952), and thus, it significantly departs from Freud and Lacan. On yet another level, Klein’s notion of the object as the object of “phantasy” elicits a powerful counterargument against the idea that autonomy and separation are crucial components of a healthy development, as suggested by the ego-psychology school of Anna Freud (2000). For Klein, autonomy is basically a fiction of the self about itself, as an ego without an object is an impossibility. The subject remains engaged in formative relationships with other persons, and places or even things (people can be very much attached to their homes, for instance) for all its adult life. Object relations theory protests the claim that such a dependence on an object is necessarily regressive or infantile. Instead, it stresses that emotional attachment, even a certain degree of dependency on other people, is “healthy” and by no means a pathological variant of personal development. In the words of the French psychoanalyst André Green, it is simply implausible to “defend an idea of psychic maturity which might smack of

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normative morality” (1986: 199) in the clinical field. According to object relations theory, nobody fully completes ego-integration; the self always entails moments of fragmentation and fluidity. Klein’s insistence on the fragmentation of the self and her notion of “persecutory anxiety” has been very fruitful in the discussion of early modern gender studies (see Keller 2007; Willis 1995). As Diane Willis suggests, weaning posed particular anxieties in the early modern era when bottle-feeding was not an option and difficulties in nursing would, indeed, put the baby in mortal danger. Also, on a more textual level, witchcraft trials echo precisely the language of “escalating hostility and fear” (Willis 1995: 47) so prominent in Klein’s discussion of object relations. Reformist theology is infused with verbal imagery of maternalism and nurturing that conspicuously overlap with object relations theories of the self. In many reformist tracts, God is not viewed as a stern patriarch, but as mild, maternal, and nurturing, as the following quotation by the divine Peter Sterry illustrates: Lay the mouth of your soul by faith to the breasts of the Godhead laid forth in Christ, swelling with all fullness; longing, delighting to be drawn, yea of their own accord spouting forth their milky streams into your face and bosom. (Sterry, qtd. in Bremer 2009: 36)

In this tract, Christ is quite literally associated with what psychoanalytic theory would call an “object”—with a maternal breast and mother’s milk, as a source of nourishment and sensual pleasure. Here, the Godhead is constructed as a benign, generous, and sensual mother. By extension, the reformist subject is viewed as a passive infant: drinking “milk” from “the breasts of the Godhead”, letting “milky streams” flow into his mouth (and, more metaphorically, into his “bosom”). Passivity here does not actually hinge upon notions of self-annihilation, as in the tracts discussed early in this chapter; instead, we are presented with a “source of the self” (Taylor 1989) that is located outside the self. The pious subject is pictured as engaged in a relationship to a benevolent, nurturing other; it is not an autonomous essence nourished from a source from within. As David Leverenz has shown in his study of Reformist sermons, letters, and tracts, this metaphor is by no means an anomaly but rather a common trait in Protestant rhetoric on both sides of the Atlantic: “Without leering, and with no fear that their manhood was threatened, preachers call themselves ‘breasts of God’” (1980: 1). Leverenz argues that this

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prevalence of maternal, feminine images is symptomatic of an “unconscious ambivalence about the father’s authority” (ibid.: 3), which might well be the case. For the pious diarist, God is giving and punishing, stern and benevolent, maternal and paternal. Keeping a diary then is not just a practice of self-monitoring but also potentially a way of engaging in a dialogue with a benign listener figure, who holds and mirrors the diarists’ various emotions. The early modern diary offers a possibility to find the approval of the stern Father and to be protected by a loving, generous, benevolent other (the maternal object) at the same time. In a cultural climate in which religion was omnipresent and potentially reached into the “deepest infrastructure of the self” (Bedford et al. 2007: 39), this double promise of the diary is much more than the proverbial carrot and stick. It is a way of reconciling the inherent contradiction between the two aspects of the new faith. God offers structure (maybe a very strict structure)—a routine and a normative grid—but also respite and plenitude. In the keeping of a journal, diarists can attempt to comply with the demands of God as patriarch (knowing that all these attempts are doomed to fail) while also finding solace in the “holding environment” offered by their faith (Winnicott 1970). Writing about one’s daily life is a way of annihilating the sinful self, but it is also a way of finding emotional security and safety. The next section explores the early modern diary through the lens of the work of D.W. Winnicott, whose emphasis on interpersonal relationships and optimism with respect to authentic self-articulation is actually quite attuned to the more benevolent aspects of Reformist moral thought.

An Interpersonal Sense of Self The work of the British object-relations theorist D.W. Winnicott has been highly influential among clinical practitioners and social workers but is much lesser known among literary critics. As Peter Rudnytsky points out, “there must be ten literary critics conversant with Lacan’s Écrits for every one who has read Winnicott’s Playing and Reality” (1993: xi). Winnicott never ceases to stress the importance of the mother-child dyad for personal development. According to him, human beings only develop a sense of self in their interaction with their primary caregiver. His enigmatic phrase “there is no such thing as a baby” (1970: 152; FN 39) entails that an individual identity is only imaginable in a relational

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structure in which “[t]he infant and maternal care form a unit” (ibid.: 39). For Winnicott, the formative moment in individual development is the affective relationship with the mother and not biological drives or Oedipal individuation. Winnicott started out as a paediatrician and remained thus throughout his career. Robert Rodman, the editor of the Routledge classic edition of Winnicott’s Playing and Reality (2005), recalls that Winnicott treated approximately 60,000 parent-infant “pairs” throughout his career (2005: xiii). Characteristically, Winnicott preferred not to treat individual children (or individual mothers or fathers for that matter) but rather pairs or small groups—a family. The social character of human development is Winnicott’s point of departure and concomitantly also his most important axiom. Furthermore, Winnicott also offers a shift in tone and “mood” (Honig 2013: 62) from thinkers like Freud, Lacan, and Klein. As his biographer Adam Phillips points out, “where Freud and Klein emphasised the role of disillusionment in human development, in which growing up was a process of mourning, for Winnicott there was a more primary sense in which development was a creative process of collaboration” (2007: 101). He agrees with his predecessors that hatred and aggression are often inevitable. However, he does not see these emotions as biological givens, instead considering them to emerge out of fraught relationships and tense situations. As a result, Winnicott’s work is less pessimistic than that of Freud, Lacan, and Klein. For him, the infant is first and foremost an agent with a capacity for learning and creativity. Winnicott’s optimism and his faith in the creative and nurturing aspect of object relations do not deflect his attention from the darker side of human relationships. Rather, Winnicott is fascinated by the variety of human experience and “affect in its diversity” (Honig 2013: 60; FN 4). Diaries, I suggest, have been formative in the history of expressing emotions in their diversity, and Winnicott provides a critical idiom to map these transitions in the practice of diary-writing. An important innovation that can be gleaned from Winnicott’s theory of the self is his reformulation of Lacan’s mirror stage. In it, Winnicott suggests that a primordial sense of self is gained in an interactive, social process, not in a solitary moment. Children, particularly early in their lives, depend largely on their caregiver, in Winnicott’s post-war Britain, the mother. The mother holds, “handl[es]” (feeds, cleans, bathes) the baby, she echoes its cooing sounds, and she imitates its facial expressions.

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In the process, the child sees itself in the gaze of the mother: “in individual emotional development the precursor of the mirror is the mother’s face” (2005: 149; emphasis in original): The bare statement is this: in the early stages of the emotional development of the human infant a vital part is played by the environment which is in fact not yet separated from the infant by the infant. The major changes take place in the separating-out of the mother as an objectively perceived environmental feature. […] A baby is held, and handled satisfactorily […] Now, at some point the baby takes a look round. […] What does the baby see when he or she looks the mother’s face? I am suggesting that, ordinarily, what the baby sees is himself or herself. (Winnicott 2005: 150–151)

It is in these interactive mirror-games that the infant gradually separates from her mother and develops a sense of self. Thus, Winnicott’s concept of the self is processual and intersubjective rather than essentialist. Winnicott insists that selfhood is acquired in an interactive, protracted process in which the primary caregiver plays a crucial part. For most parts of his work, this is the “mother”, although he concludes the article by stressing the importance of other members of the family or caregivers for the formation of a subject’s selfhood (2005: 158). The self, as theorised by Winnicott, is “relational” (Eakin 1998) and not autonomous or individualistic. In this vein, his theory has some interesting parallels with scholarly debates on early modern identity, which similarly tend to stress community over individuality and relationships over autonomy. For example Verena Lobsien (1996)  shows that early modern autobiographies and poems portray the self in ways that considerably differ from their later Romantic counterparts. The early modern autobiographical (or poetic) subject is typically depicted as embedded in social networks such as kinship or patronage (ibid.). According to Lobsien, early modern writers (such as Milton and Shakespeare, but also lesser-­known figures such as Lucy Hutchinson) narrate their lives along “heterological” lines: these authors write about themselves as they write about others—a patron, a near kin, and so forth. Viewed through the lens of Lobsien’s notion of heterology, it would be a gross misreading to interpret such narratives as a symptom for deficient or incomplete selfhood. Rather, according to Lobsien, early modern writers narrate their lives in relation to an “alterity” (1996: 6), be it a “radical transcendence” or another person. Early modern subjectivity cannot be understood

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outside such relationships, relationships that are often described in autobiographical texts. Thus, Hutchinson’s self-portrait is structured along the lines of community and belonging. A similar case has been made by Nancy Selleck, who argues that the language of Shakespeare and Donne is infused with the “sense that one’s identity inheres first in the other” (2008: 6). According to Selleck, the hallmark of early modern culture is an “interpersonal idiom”, which places the self not as an autonomous individual but as a relational construct. This interpersonal subjectivity involves not just the psychological or cognitive level, but also stretches into the physical domain (ibid.: 3). Early modern humoral medicine pictured the body as porous and volatile, as vulnerable to all sorts of outside influences (see also Paster 2004). Another prominent contribution in defence of relational concepts of early modern identity is the work of the historian Gabriele Jancke. For Jancke, the prevalent focus on individuality in historicist research on “ego-­ documents” is misconceived, as the modern individual is one possibility of being a person among many historical and cultural possibilities (2015). Jancke takes her cue from the cultural anthropologist Marcel Mauss, who initially coined the term “person” to analyse and describe identity among indigenous societies such as sub-Saharan Africans and Australians. In Mauss’s view, such societies, unlike the twentieth-century Euro-American world, have not undergone a process of individualisation (1985: 4–12). Punning on the Latin term “persona”, which literally denotes the mask that was put on by actors in Roman antiquity, he points out that in indigenous communities, human beings are considered the bearers of roles (“personnalités”, ibid.: 11) and, hence, as “persons” rather than selves or individuals. Typically, adolescents gain the status of a person by undergoing a ritual or process of initiation, which would often coincide with naming ceremonies (ibid.). Therefore, unlike the notion of the individual, the concept of the person does not depend on a system of individualism, freedom, and agency but, instead, on roles, norms, conformity, and relationality (see also Jancke and Ulbrich 2005). An important innovation that can be gathered from Jancke’s reading of Mauss is an amendment to the study of early modern construction of identity in life writing: a shift to the foci on kinship relations, but also to space, the body, food or clothes, and, hence, material objects (Jancke 2015: 349–350). Indeed, many diaries—most notably those of Samuel Pepys and Anne Clifford—are riddled with references to material objects

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(clothes, pieces of art, buildings etc.) as well as referencing food and sociable events. I find in Winnicott an “interpersonal idiom” (Selleck) that conspicuously overlaps with that of Sellek’s and Jancke’s studies of early modern culture. Furthermore, Winnicott’s emphasis on interpersonal subjectivity ties in very well with the relational language used by Lobsien’s “heterological” autobiographers. Winnicott stresses that the subject never entirely ceases to be in a “state of dependency” with respect to her “environment” (Rodman 2005: xii), a term Winnicott uses in the broadest possible sense, entailing the family, social relationships, and places (Winnicott 2005: 141–148). Where Lacan and Freud stress individuation, Winnicott highlights relationality and attachment. Throughout his work, Winnicott avoids clear-cut either/or but stresses “intermediate zones” (2005: 141) and “transitional phenomena” (2005: 1–34). For Winnicott, psychoanalysis wrongly separates inner life from outward behaviour, as “we spend most our time, neither in behaviour nor in contemplation but somewhere else” (2005: 141). While there is no need to agree with Winnicott on his universalism, his concept of “transitional object” is nevertheless helpful in analysing diary-writing as a practice within life. This does not imply, however, that I set out to “apply” Winnicott’s theory of individual development to early modern diaries mechanically. Nor do I regard early modern society as a macro-subject that is transitioning from dependence to autonomy. Rather, I look to Winnicott in search of metaphors and images to connect texts from a distant past and thus, from a vastly different cultural background, with my own reading experiences of them. As a reader in the twenty-first century, I am unable to relate to the ideological framework that undergirds the early modern diary, but I can still try to develop an understanding of why the practice was meaningful to the early modern writer and continues to be meaningful to diarists today. Thus, when I put the early modern diary in a dialogue with Winnicott’s work on “transitional phenomena and transitional objects”, I look for continuities between the past and the present, while being aware of the gaps and differences.

Transitional Phenomena Death and bereavement were so common in the early modern era that there is now a long historical debate on the quality of the affective bonds within the family (Stone 1977; Pollock 1983). Intriguingly, Winnicott

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develops his notion of the “transitional object” while working with bereaved children in the aftermath of World War II. Where historians discuss parental feelings, Winnicott is interested in the emotional life of children that had to face a loss that was most likely self-shattering. Yet, Winnicott, rather than sentimentalising his young patients, observes that they still maintain a certain amount of creativity while playing. Watching children at play, he realises that children engage in formative relationships with material objects, for instance, a teddy bear, a blanket, or a doll. Children can become “addicted to such objects” (Winnicott 2005: 1). These toys or blankets, unlike the Kleinian object, are recognised as a “not me” (ibid.: 2), as belonging to a world outside the self. Moreover, Winnicott argues that, as such, these objects do not exclusively serve an “oral-erotic” (ibid.) purpose: It is clear that something is important here other than oral excitement and satisfaction, although this may be the basis for everything else. Many other important things can be studied, and they include:

1. The nature of the object. 2. The infant’s capacity to recognize the object as ‘not-me’. 3. The place of the object: inside, outside, at the border. 4. The infant’s capacity to create, think-up, devise, originate, and produce and object. 5. The initiation of an affectionate type of object-relationship. (ibid.) As this passage illustrates, Winnicott stresses that infants can engage in relationships with things that obviously stand for the mother/caregiver but are not identical with her (ibid.: 5). The infant’s emotional attachment to the “transitional object” becomes a resource to withstand anxiety or disappointment and a means of coping with the absence of a parent. Winnicott calls these toys “transitional objects” because they sustain the child’s development or transition from one stage to another. As Bonnie Honig explains, [p]laying with its blanket or teddy bear, the baby comes to know a reality beyond him or herself. When s/he cathects onto that object, s/he acquires the emotional resources to withstand the disappointments of mother or caregiver, to s/he may safely rage against them, and when s/he exercises control over the blanket, hiding and finding it, for example, as in Freud

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‘fort-da’ game, Freud says s/he learns mastery and control, but Winnicott emphasises the lesson of object permanence. (2013: 70)

Unlike Freud, Winnicott is attuned to the infant’s savage affection for the object, which entails both aggression and love. The object is “affectionately cuddled as well as excitedly loved and mutilated” (2005: 7), and the transitional object is able to “survive” the child’s destructive impulses. It is thus that, for Winnicott’s bereaved children, the transitional object has a capacity their parents do not have. More often than not, children traumatised by war and early loss fantasise that they are, in a way, responsible for their parents’ premature death. The transitional object can be used— cuddled, hit, thrown on the floor—but it still remains more or less intact. Winnicott thus concludes that “object permanence” is vital for the child, more vital than mastery and control: [The analyst] will find that after ‘subject relates to object’ comes ‘subject destroys object” (as it becomes external) […] The subject says to the object […] ‘Hullo object’ ‘I destroyed you’ ‘I love you.’ ‘You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you’ […] The subject can now use the object that has survived’. (2005: 120–121)

The transitional object thus attains particular importance for the infant because it can “survive” all sorts of negative, destructive impulses. It therefore has an intermediate quality between fantasy and reality (Rudnytsky 1993: xiii), as it is both an actual teddy bear or doll and something that the child fantasises while playing with it. Rudnytsky’s conclusion that the transitional object therefore “forshadows the work of art” (ibid.: xii) implies that the child at play is an artist in the making. This is a bit too Wordsworthian, but his basic intuition that the transitional object is both a fabrication of the infant’s mind and an actual external material thing seems correct. I would conclude that Winnicott’s theory of the transitional object offers an inventory of metaphors that connect the early modern diary with more recent forms of the genre. First, the transitional object is associated with permanence (see also Honig 2013: 70); it “must never change, unless changed by the infant” (2005: 7). Concomitantly, the diary “freez[es] time” (Lejeune 2009: 25)—it holds and stores the thoughts, emotions, and memories of its author and has an afterlife following their death. Diaries serve as an aide-mémoire, which is more permanent than the

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diarists’ actual memory. Also, on a very practical level, a material object and medium, the journal quite literally survives the diarist. More metaphorically, the diary offers a “holding environment” (Winnicott 1970) for tensions and aggressions. Writing about anger or distress, diarists can distance themselves from their emotions and come to terms with them. It is possible to “dump” (Brennan 2004: 13) affect into the diary, as Teresa Brennan puts it in a different context. Diaries can serve to let out “steam” (Freud 1996: 56) without facing social consequences. Thus, the diary can be “used” in Winnicott’s sense as a vent for “destructive impulses” (Rudnytsky 1993: xii). The diary, both as a material object and as a product of fantasy, as “Vorstellung”, survives even the most aggressive parts of a diarist’s personality. Like Winnicott’s transitional object, the diary (or rather, the process of writing a diary) can help the diarist cope with the absence of an actual listener. Without taking this promise of emotional security and nurturing into account, it is difficult to comprehend the tenacity of the practice of diary-keeping. It is the “object”-function of diary-keeping that connects the pious sort with its later, secular variants. In the course of the late seventeenth century, the Other as God gradually fades from the horizon. However, the promise of finding structure, safety, and comfort in writing a journal does not. The diary can still be used to construct a benevolent listener-figure, an “object”, without necessarily needing to be pious. The practice of writing enables diarists to distance themselves from urgent affects (see also Gruber 2008: 59) and to see themselves, for a fleeting moment, as a benign Other might see them. This is not to say that I am recuperating the trope that diary-writing has a therapeutic function (Gruber 2008: 46; Lejeune 2009: 195; Ożarska 2013: 16). For the seventeenth-century diarist, writing may not have been “scriptotheraphy” in Suzette Henke’s sense (2000: xx). Rather, diary-­ writing implies a moment of self-distancing that might as well be shameful. What is important is that the diary has the potential of writing to oneself as if the self were a benevolent other. The curious formula “cher cahier” (ibid.: 93; “dear book”), which Lejeune discovers in late-­ eighteenth-­century French diaries, illustrates that the eighteenth-century diary is no longer exclusively a form of rigorous self-scrutiny, but a “letter to oneself” (ibid.: 87), and hence a much less restrictive form of self-expression. Winnicott’s theory is also illuminating regarding the concept of development itself: Winnicott does not view individual development in terms of

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clear-cut stages that “progressively dispense with each other” (Phillipps 2007: 82); instead, he suggests that attachment, dependence, and autonomy are all included in a “personal repertoire” (ibid.). As the transitional object enables the subject to move from one developmental stage to another, the diary can similarly be seen as accompanying the gradual transitions which began to take place in the late seventeenth century: transitions from public to private, from community to autonomy, from religion to individualism (McKeon 2005: 3–312). These separations come in an equivocal, protracted, and “dialectical” (ibid.: 110) process. The diary not only records these separations but is instrumental in the process. As the diary gradually becomes a genre associated with intimacy, privacy, and domesticity—a text to be hidden from prying eyes (which, as the ensuing chapters will show, was really only the case among urban elites)—it still bears the main characteristics of its earlier semi-public ancestors. It is still a “container” for emotions and a very practical aide-mémoire, but it is no longer dependent on a religious framework. Religion, we can conclude with Winnicott, is “decathected”: it is not forgotten and not mourned, but very much like the transitional object, it gradually “loses meaning” (2005: 7). The diary is thus marked by a certain amount of tenacity in terms of form and use but also by fluidity and change in terms of its rationale. At a certain point in time, the diarist no longer needed religious justification for keeping a diary and, moreover, his religion no longer appeared to demand the practice. I would argue that diary-writing remained widespread because the form had acquired a psychic-cultural significance in its own right. The diary as transitional object can be linked to a multiplicity of affects rather than just one. Writing the diary can be a source of ambiguous jouissance, echoing the pleasure that comes from fulfilling one’s duty. It can be used as a vent or container for powerful negative emotions, such as grief, anger, and anxiety, while also functioning as a medium to record happy memories, as an expression of gratitude, joy, and relief. The individual case studies that follow in the next chapters will analyse the specific ways in which diarists framed, expressed, or were silent about their emotional lives. While there is a development from relative silence in the very first extant diaries (see Chap. 4) to narrative elaboration and frankness in the Restoration, there are also continuities and connections between diarists throughout the seventeenth century. The following chapters do not present progressivist stages in the history of the diary, but they rather set out

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to shed light on the variability of individual self-expression along a historical continuum. Before moving on to analyse individual diaries, I conclude the discussion of early modern emotional self-expression with a brief excursus on emotions in the cognitive sciences, which have become increasingly prominent in literary criticism. My aim is not to reject cognitive approaches, but to explain where early modern studies and cognitivism must part ways.

Excursus: Emotions in Cognitive Science—Terms and Debates While cognitive science is very much en vogue in the humanities, historians of emotional expressions such as Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (2004), Jan Plamper (2015), and William Reddy (2015) share a certain reservation about the use of scientific models in historicist study. The controversy hinges on the question of the anthropological universality of emotional expression. Paul Ekman, one of the leading cognitive theorists of emotions, was initially trained in cultural anthropology rather than in neuroscience. However, Ekman breaks with the culturalist paradigm in cultural anthropology and questions the historical-­cultural specificity and constructed character of emotions (see, for instance, Ekman 1971; Ekman and Friesen 1971). Ekman considers emotions to be “a universal language” (Evans 2003: 1), suggesting that the expression of emotion is not culture-specific. Thus, for Ekman, emotion is essentially pan-cultural and transhistorical. He argues that six “basic emotions” (Ekman 1992) are innate: these have a “distinctive physiology” and are not affected by cultural circumstances (1992: 56, see also Ekman 1999: 48). The basic emotions are happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, disgust, and fear (ibid.). Unlike higher cognitive emotions (such as jealousy or romantic love), they have a “quick onset” and a “brief duration” and are present in “other primates” as well (1992: 56). Furthermore, cognitive science also distinguishes between acute “emotional states” (which only last a few seconds) and chronic or long-term “moods” such as nostalgia (Kagan 2007: 27). The differentiation between mood and emotion is thus based on the temporal structure rather than on their salience.

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Ekman became famous with a study he carried out among the Fore community in the Southeast of New Guinea, then an “isolated, Neolithic” (Ekman 1971: 155) culture uninformed about Euro-American forms of emotion expression. Ekman set up the following experiment: with the help of a translator, Ekman told the Fore informants stories—“a man comes to his hut and discovers that there is a pig inside of it”—and then showed them three different photographs of mostly white American people whose faces showed strong emotions (for instance, surprise, pain, or joy). The Fore informants were then asked to match the photographs with the narratives. To Ekman’s surprise, they matched the stories and the facial expressions in exactly the same way as his American subjects did. It was only the facial expression for fear that was sometimes matched with the story that was supposed to invoke surprise and vice versa (1971: 155). But, apart from that, emotions and their physiological expression seemed to translate very smoothly across cultural divides. To verify his hypothesis about the universality of emotional expression, Ekman returned to the United States to repeat the experiment in a reversed situation. In New Guinea, he had asked his subjects to imagine how they would feel in a given situation, for instance, in the event that their child would die. Ekman had then taken pictures of the subjects. Back in the United States, Ekman showed the photographs to American subjects who would then match them with the stories. Ekman’s American participants were perfectly able to read the facial expressions of the Fore. Ekman therefore concluded that facial expressions of emotions overlap cross-culturally (see ibid.). Ekman had tested his hypothesis before in a survey that was carried out among Japanese-American and American students of European origin (Ekman 1971: 156). The design of the study went as follows: the students watched films showing, among other things, plastic surgery and a ritual circumcision in two different settings (ibid.; see also Evans 2003: 10–11). First, the students watched the films in a large group and, later, in a solitary setting. On both occasions, the subjects were filmed by Paul Ekman. When on their own with the TV set, Japanese-American students reacted along very similar lines to their white colleagues: their faces displayed disgust. However, when the students watched the films in a larger group, the Japanese subjects were more likely to “smile politely” (Ekman 1971: 156) and were, thus, displaying an emotion that differed from that in the earlier setups. These interesting results, however, were only yielded when Ekman watched the films showing the subjects in slow motion (1971: 153): then

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he could see that the Japanese students also initially reacted with disgust in the group setting but then very quickly modified their facial expression to a smile. Ekman concludes that the initial feeling the subjects showed was similar along transcultural lines. However, he qualifies that the emotion displayed in public differed considerably, since the “display rules” (Ekman 1971: 156) that operate in Japanese culture do not encourage people to display emotions as openly as American culture does (see also Evans 2003: 11, 16). Ekman is particularly interested in circumventing cultural conventions and in capturing authentic, embodied expressions of feeling (see also Ekman 2005). Ekman’s desire to escape language by focussing on facial expressions and to evade display rules may indeed be adequate and necessary in a scientific context. For a cultural critic, however, the phenomena Ekman terms “display rules”, that is, the conventions, discourses, and moral philosophies which impact the expression of affect are of particular interest. As the elaborate designs of Ekman’s studies suggest, the way emotions are evaluated, framed (politically, ethically, scientifically), and verbally expressed varies considerably over time and across cultures—otherwise, why would he have to go through such pains in resorting to slow-­ motion camera techniques and travelling the world in search of subjects that have “never seen a Caucasian” (1971: 156)? Cultural historians have been wary about Ekman’s assumption that photography is an “objective” technique (Paster et  al. 2004: 8). Furthermore, Jan Plamper records that Ekman’s setup has been particularly attacked in his own discipline, primarily because the Fore community has no lexeme for “surprise” and he relied heavily on narrative mediation to discern the alleged spontaneous, acute emotional state of a subject (see Plamper 2015: 185). However, my scepticism is not geared towards the overall reliability of Ekman’s findings but rather at its relevance for my study. I wonder how it would be possible to evade language in a historicist study. Moreover, the very concept of feigning an emotion is a bit mismatched when exploring texts of an era in which rituals and theatricality marked the everyday and the difference between performance and “that within” was hard to maintain. Ekman would have been likely to produce photographs of “stony faces rather than visibly sorrowful ones” (Kern Paster et al. 2004: 11), like the famous portrait of Thomas Cromwell by Hans Holbein the Elder. This lack of expression should not be too easily read as a lack of feeling, and conversely, spontaneous outbursts of emotions (as in Romantic poetry)

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cannot be parsed as “authentic expressions” (ibid.). The way emotions are framed, comprehended, expressed, controlled, and regulated is historically contingent and shifts tremendously over time, even if the physiological correlative of the emotion may well be pan-cultural.

Terminology Some critics have suggested using a different idiom in the cultural study of emotion, arguing that “emotion refers to cultural and social expression, whereas affects are of a biological and physiological nature” (Probyn 2005: 11). In a similar vein, Kristin Gorton, in her review of feminist works on affect theory, suggests that “affect” is more firmly rooted in biology (2007: 334), whereas emotion depends on its cultural and social expression. Put into this particular idiom, Ekman would be focussing on affect, whereas cultural historians would be analysing emotions. On a purely analytical level, the distinction between affect (physical, pre-verbal, non-conscious, biological, and transhistorical) and emotion (social, conscious, and historically contingent) might be useful. Seen from a more phenomenological angle, however, this distinction is difficult to maintain. As Teresa Brennan argues, affect is transmitted between bodies: we “feel the atmosphere” (2004: 1) when we enter a classroom; we become part of a merry crowd during a concert or soccer match; and mobs are driven by a synchronised sense of hatred and appetite for destruction. For these reasons, the notion that affect is pre-social is not convincing. Another problem with the distinction between affect and emotion is that it relies on a dualism between the mind and the body that is very much historically specific. This distinction ties in with the “James-Lange theory” of emotion, which has come under much scrutiny in psychology. As William James explain in his Principles of Psychology, [o]ur natural way of thinking […] is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My thesis, on the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion. […] We feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble. (1950: 449, italics in original)

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Read along the lines of Gorton and Shouse’s differentiation between affect and emotion, affect would be the corporeal experience of anger, which only later leads to the cognitive realisation “I am angry”. Only the latter would be called “emotion” in the idiom espoused by Shouse. However, the “James-Lange theory” eclipses the fact that very similar physiological changes are subjectively experienced as qualitatively different emotions: a racing heart can accompany both fear and anger, for instance. Consequently, critics like Brennan and Ngai use affect and emotion interchangeably. Susanne Ngai explains that [while] the theoretical distinction between affect and emotion is thus helpful in a number of ways, I will not be leaning on it to the extent that others have—as may be apparent from the way in which I use the two terms more or less interchangeably. [T]he difference between affect and emotion is taken as a modal difference of intensity or degree, rather than a formal difference of quality and kind. My assumption is that affects are less formed and structured, but not lacking in form and structure altogether. (2005: 27)

This study follows Ngai’s lead and uses the lexemes feeling, emotion, and affect interchangeably. For an early modern subject, emotions are both embodied and very social; they are staged, displayed, and feigned as much as they are hidden. With its interest in the volatility of emotions, its emphasis on the impact of norms on the workings of subjectivity, and its interpersonal, processual concept of the self, psychoanalysis does provide a flexible and enlightening idiom for discussing the variousness of emotional expression in early modern diaries. As the following case studies will illustrate, some early modern diarists “use” their diaries to monitor their emotions, to guard themselves against dangerous passions, but also construct a pious interiority in alignment with other spiritual models. Others are more silent about their feelings but seem to find pleasure in performing the religious routine of documenting their spiritual tasks. Often, diaries tell about affective, intimate relationships which have the potential to endow them with political power and, consequently, help them in their struggle for legal personhood. Samuel Pepys’s diary, which will be discussed in Chap. 7, combines these various practices.

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CHAPTER 4

Creating Pious Identity: Margaret Hoby’s Reformist Diary

The diary of the Yorkshire gentlewoman Margaret Hoby is the first extant woman’s diary in English (Lamb 1999: 43). It is also often considered to be a “dry recitation of routine events” (Warnicke 1983: 148), thus, as the “least developed” (Seelig 2006: 15) diary of its kind, not read for its literary qualities but rather for historical reasons (ibid.). Ralph Houlbrooke, for instance, suggests that it paints an “unrivalled picture of the daily activities of a country gentlewoman” (1988: 15). Feminist historians, such as Susan Cahn, use Hoby’s diary as evidence for the relative economic independence of early modern women of Hoby’s class (1987). Mary Ellen Lamb argues that Hoby’s journal “provides invaluable insights into the interiority of the Reformation subject, especially as inflected by gender” (1999: 64). Thus, with the possible exception of Sharon Seelig, critics seem to agree that Hoby’s diary is interesting because of its content but quite unremarkable on a formal-textual level. While agreeing with Warnicke that Hoby’s diary offers little aesthetic reward, I would nevertheless insist that its repetitive formal make-up is by no means trivial: of over 100 autobiographical accounts written between 1550 and 1700, only 4 out of 31 female-authored accounts are written in serial format and only two follow the diary format (Matchinske 2009: 207). It is thus curious and worth investigating Hoby’s choice of the diurnal form. Another important characteristic of Hoby’s writing is her intriguing silence about her thoughts, attitudes, and emotions. Her diary “offers remarkably little intimate revelation. Lady Hoby’s diary was not a place for © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Nandi, Reading the Early Modern English Diary, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42327-8_4

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her to tell at all”, as Sharon Seelig puts it (2006: 16). With characteristic lack of specificity, Hoby writes about her “priuat praiers” (2001: 4) or having “passed the time in talk with some freinds” (sic, 2001: 9) without relating the content of her prayers or the topics of her conversation. Hoby is no exception: early modern life writing is usually silent about “feelings and fantasies” (Skura 2000: 211, see also Shuger 2000). However, silence about an inner life need not automatically suggest an actual lack of feelings (Kern Paster et al. 2004: 11). In a similar vein, treating writers like Hoby as “blank slate[s]” not yet “interpellated” (Barker qtd. in Skura 2000: 211) into bourgeois culture rests on a great deal of speculation: just because Hoby hardly ever mentions emotions does not necessarily mean that she did not experience them. Thus, texts as Hoby’s require a critical approach precisely because they predate the rise of the bourgeois subject. The present chapter falls into three parts. First, it will provide some background information on Margaret Hoby as a historical persona and the specific regional situation of North Yorkshire in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras. North Riding was a region dominated by recusants, and the Hobys were one of the very few landed dissenting families in the area. According to Elizabeth Crawford (2010, 2014), it is likely that the diarist felt beleaguered by Catholics and more moderate Anglicans, which may well have been one of the motives for Hoby’s keeping a diurnal record of her pious practices. Second, I will assess the formal characteristics of the diary in the context of the reformist ideal of self-monitoring. As Mary Ellen Lamb has argued convincingly, “Hoby’s diary demonstrates the significant role of reading practices in shaping the subjectivity of Hoby and other women in the Reformation” (1999: 64). I will amend Lamb’s content-oriented reading of Hoby’s diary in suggesting that the iterative, repetitive structure of the diary similarly answers to the religious demand for rigorous, regular self-scrutiny. Hoby’s struggle to discern God’s will is open-ended, as is her diary. Third, I will analyse Hoby’s intriguing silence about her inner life from a psychoanalytic angle. My aim is to show that the text vacillates between anxiety and matter-of-factness, between narrating time and constructing pious interiority, between “dry[ness]” (Warnicke 1983: 148) and a certain affectivity. Hoby’s rigorous practice of self-monitoring is suggestive of a very complex interiority—she finds herself guilty of certain “sinnes” and “Omitions” but also occasionally regards her self-monitoring as a form of

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regenerative purge. Hoby is not a “dissident subject” in Sinfield’s sense. Rather, her subjectivity hinges on fulfilling (perhaps even overfulfilling) what she considers to be her normative duty.

A Voice Without a Face Lady Margaret was born and raised in Yorkshire, a stronghold for recusancy (Meads 1930: 4, see also Moody 2001: xvii, FN 4). She was baptised on 10 February 1571, and since baptism typically took place shortly after the birth of an infant, it is very likely that she was born only a few weeks earlier. Her parents, Thomasine and Arthur Dakins, both adhered to the “Puritan” faith, which made them outsiders in the region (Meads 1930: 4). They sent her to the household of Katherine Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon (1538–1620), for her education and training. Lord Hastings was one of the few landed reformists in Yorkshire and a very influential figure at court—he was a long-time consort of the ageing Queen Elizabeth. It was also Hastings who engineered the match between Margaret and Thomas Posthumous Hoby (Crawford 2010: 195, see also Meads 1930: 26). The Huntingdons were deeply influenced by Calvinism (see Moody 2001: xviii), and beyond doubt, Margaret’s faith was grounded in her education in the Huntingdon household (see Cross 2008: n.p.). Her upbringing at the Huntingdons’ may have also inspired her habit of keeping a daily record of devotional and secular activities (ibid.). Margaret was married three times: first to Walter Devereux (the second son of the Earl of Essex) who, like Margaret, was educated in the Huntingdon household (Meads 1930: 5). Devereux died in 1591, only two years after their wedding (ibid.: 11). Only a few weeks after Devereux’s burial, Margaret attracted new suitors (ibid.). This led to her second marriage to Thomas Sidney (the younger brother of Sir Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke). Some biographers speculate that the marriage with Sidney was the “love-match [that Margaret] most desired” (Moody 2001: xxii; see also Meads 1930: 11). However, the diary is entirely silent on the subject of both marriages. Although Margaret never mentions it in her diary, she was initially reluctant to marry Thomas Posthumous Hoby after Sidney’s death in July 1595 (see Meads 1930: 29). Apparently, Thomas Posthumous was short-­ tempered and notorious for initiating conflict with influential landed families of the region, most notably with the Eures, with whom he shared an intense mutual dislike (Crawford 2010: 196; Moody 2001: xxiii; Lamb

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2000: 26). What is more, Thomas Posthumous Hoby started wooing Margaret only a week after the death of Thomas Sidney, when she was still in mourning (Lamb 1999: 84). However, the pressure to marry Hoby was immense. First, the Devereux family (that of her first husband) laid claim to Margaret’s considerable property and, without a male guardian, she feared that she would lose her estates at Hackness. After both her father and her guardian, the Earl of Huntingdon, had died, she was largely without defences against the claims of the Devereux family (see also Meads 1930: 31). Second, and of equal significance, several important reformist court figures (among them the Countess of Huntingdon) sought to find a counterweight against the recusant majority in the North. Consequently, Huntingdon pressured Margaret to marry Thomas Hoby, “not for any merits of his own, which reportedly were few, but for ‘God’s cawse’” (Crawford 2010: 195). Thomas Hoby was “planted” (ibid.) in the North Riding region by the Cecils and the Huntingdons because he and his pious, affluent wife were thought to serve as a “counterweight to the recusant and Catholic-sympathizing gentry in Northeastern Yorkshire” (ibid.: 196). The Hobys settled into the manor house of Hackness in 1596, which had been Margaret’s property before the marriage, as her relatives had purchased it for her when she was still married to Devereux (ibid., see also Meads 1930: 26). Lady Margaret had good social relationships with the local gentry, both recusant and Protestant. According to Julie Crawford, Margaret Hoby was more diplomatic than her husband, the gentler and potentially more likeable face of Calvinism in the North, and thus may well have served as an intermediary between radical Protestants and the recusant majority (Crawford 2010, 2014: 86–120). If Hoby considered it a responsibility to spread Calvinist beliefs in a region initially hostile to her faith, she never mentioned it. Neither did she write about a sense of being beleaguered as a member of the very few radical Protestant households in the North Riding area. Here, as in other contexts, Margaret Hoby remained silent about her inner life. In the diary, she comes across as serene, untroubled by the recusancy of her neighbours, while also remaining loyal to her husband despite their very different reputations in the region. Lady Hoby also remains taciturn about the fact that she had no offspring; each of her three marriages were childless. The diary was first mentioned by Evelyn Fox (1908), who introduced the text for the Royal Historical Society. The manuscript of the diary is in the British Library Manuscript Department (BL MS Egerton 2614) and

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was first transcribed by Dorothy M. Meads in 1930, whose introduction to the text (1930: 1–39) is still referred to as authoritative (see Crawford 2010). While Meads focussed chiefly on the historical persona of Margaret Hoby and her contemporaries, Joanna Moody’s more recent edition of the diary also includes more information on the materiality of the text. According to Moody, Margaret Hoby wrote on both sides of a folio, which measures 15 by 19 centimetres (2001: liii). The remaining manuscript consists of 59 folios (118 pages), which were apparently bound in May 1884 after their purchase by Reverend C.  St B.  Sydenham on 10 November 1883 (ibid.). As Moody points out, “the writing varies in size, and there are blots, smudges, crossings-out and corrections” (ibid.). The dates in the diary are often erratic. For example, some entries refer to the days of the week, counting Monday as “the first day” (ibid.: liv), but this is not always the case. Moody’s suggestion that “[s]he clearly wrote entries, even groups of entries in retrospect, and often corrected the dates herself” (ibid.: ibid.) is therefore very plausible. Moody’s transcription remains very close to the manuscript and does not modernise or harmonise Hoby’s erratic spelling. The diarist uses u and v interchangeably, and her spelling occasionally echoes the regional dialect of North Riding: vowels were typically “broad”, meaning they were not pronounced as diphthongs (“wrote” is spelled “wrett”, for instance; Moody 2001: 3; FN 5). In this chapter, I quote exclusively from Moody’s 2001 edition, although some of the biographical information was taken from Meads’s 1930 introduction to the text.

Temporality, Patterns, and Structures Margaret Hoby’s diary starts in medias res on 10 August 1599 and covers a time span of almost six years, ending abruptly on 21 July 1605. The first two folios and the last have missing pieces, so the manuscript is likely to be incomplete (see Moody 2001: liii). If the diarist had a rationale for writing, she does not disclose it in the surviving manuscript. She never mentions her motives for keeping a journal. The most striking feature of Hoby’s text is its sequential, repetitive pattern. Most entries consist of four or five sentences that resemble each other in structure and content. Writing on a regular, almost daily, basis, Hoby documents her daily activities, usually beginning with her morning prayers and breakfast. The journal then goes on to describe her activities

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around the house or in the village as well as her readings. Her range of reference is impressive: she reads the Bible (of course) and a host of religious authors, most notably William Perkins (1558–1602), Richard Rogers, and Richard Greenham (1535–1584). Sometimes, the diarist mentions conversations with her husband, although she never actually specifies their content. Hoby also relates social activities such as reading to her servants, visiting her family, or entertaining guests like the Eure family, though their relations with her husband were fraught. Margaret Hoby, however, was on good terms with the Eures and may have even been a close friend of Lady Eure, whom she calls “my lady Ewre” when recording a visit in September 1599 (Hoby 2001: 14). Furthermore, she often writes about meeting with Master Rhodes, her divine, and also, we can assume, her friend and the only person who read Hoby’s diary in her own time. She usually finishes with a note about her final evening prayers and the formula “and so to bed”. In this vein, most of her entries resemble the following extract: the Lordes day 12 [August 1599] after I was redie, I went to priuatt praiers, then to breakfast : then I walked tell church time Mr. Hoby, and after to dinner : after which I walked and had speech of no serious maters tell :2: a clock : then I wrett notes into my bible tell :3, and after :4: I came againe from the church, walk, and meditated a Litle, and againe wrett some other notes in my bible of that I had Learned tell :5: att which time I retourned to examenation and praier : and after I had reed some of bond of the suboth, I walked abroad : and so to supper, after praers, and Lastly to bed. (Hoby 2001: 3–4)

This entry is very characteristic of the diary as a whole; it conveys the sense that Hoby documents her activities like an accountant would list her income and expenses: neat, orderly, brief, and with a matter-of-fact detachment. Here, as in almost all other entries of her meticulously kept journal, she does not specify the content of her prayers or her conversation, nor does she comment on the sermon she heard in church or whether she enjoyed the walk with her husband or maybe felt guilty for speaking of “no serious maters”. The diarist also remains conspicuously silent about the matters she reflected upon when “examen[ing]” herself. Her diary does not seem to be a place to confess or merely to narrate. Instead, the text resembles a list and only has very few characteristics of narrative— both in the classical (plot-related) and in the cognitive sense. It may have

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a chronological structure, full sentences, and an embodied narrative voice, but it is crucially not concerned with “qualia” (Herman 2009: 14) and evokes only a very low degree of “experientiality”. The diary remains silent about “what it [was] like” (ibid.) to have conversation, to pray, or to read on a particular day. Instead, Hoby appears to be very aware of time. She not only structures her diary along diurnal lines but frequently calibrates time by the hour, particularly in the first two years of her diary. The following entry dating from the first weeks of her journal may illustrate Hoby’s awareness and meticulous calibration of time: Wensday 15 [August 1599] In the morninge at :6: a clock I praied priautly : that done, I went to awiffe in trauill of child, about whom I was busey tell: 1 a Cloke, about which time, She bing deliuered and I hauinge praised god, returned home and betook my selfe to priuat praier :2: seuerall times vpon occasion : then I wrett the most part of an examenation or triall of a christian, framed by Mr Rhodes [her chaplain, M.N.], in the doinge wher I againe fell to praier, and after continewed writing [faded] after 3: a cloke : then I went to work tell after 5, and then examenation and praier : the Lord make me thankfull, who hath hard my praiers and hath not turned his face from me: then I taked with Mrs Brutnell tell supper time, and after walked a little into the feeldes, and so to prairs, and then to bed. (2001: 6)

The passage lends itself to Stuart Sherman’s interpretation that diaries tell time as it passes. More specifically, Hoby constructs time along “theocentric” lines, as Sherman explains (1996: 52). In Hoby’s diary, time is never “neutral” or important per se—as the market time was important for the Renaissance merchant. For the Reformist Hoby, time is a gift from God that must be treated carefully and responsibly. This is one reason why Hoby meticulously documents everything she does each and every day. In this vein, she also juxtaposes spiritual and secular topics in her diary: Hoby prays, acts as midwife for a local “wiffe”, copies a religious text, prays again, and then ends her day with a walk in the fields and evening prayers. Such a blurring of boundaries between spiritual and secular duties is crucial, I think, with respect to the religious mindset that informs her diary. Being “busey” around the household was thought to be godly, whereas idleness would have been considered a sin. William Perkins, whose works Hoby read and copied on a regular basis, directs a diatribe against beggars and vagabonds whom he considers harmful for the commonwealth.

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Making “good” use of one’s time was endowed with spiritual value, and, conversely, “wasting time”—in idleness, drink, or “idle talk”—was viewed as sinful (see also Morgan 1988: 147). The diarist’s concern with time may also account for a certain shift which takes place in the second half of her diary: while the entries in the first four years of her diary focus on her pious and her secular duties alike, most entries in the last two years focus on worldly events, such as sociable dinners with her neighbours. I would agree with Elspeth Graham and Sharon Seelig that “there is no absolute difference between spiritual and social aspects of virtuous femininity” (Graham et al. 1989, qtd. in Seelig 2006: 226). Dining with her neighbours, many of whom were recusants or moderate Anglicans, was actually not time spent idly but rather a part of her religious duty. As Julie Crawford has shown in her study Mediatrix, Hoby, like other pious women of her time, acted as an intermediary between her unpopular dissenting husband and the recusant majority (see Crawford 2010). Her visits with Lady Eure and other “papest maide[s]” (see Hoby 2001: 64) or hearing her minister Rhodes reading from a “popeshe” (ibid.: 83) book, an officially illegal act in Elizabethan England (c.f. Crawford 2010: 198), clearly serve the purpose of mediating between radical Protestants and Catholics and, thus, of maintaining a power balance in the North (Crawford: 193–220). Margaret Hoby “navigated between maintaining good relations with members of the established church and supporting its critics” (ibid.: 216). Social events (such as Hoby’s frequent visits to the Dean of York and the Bishop of Limerick in the years 1603 and 1604), her mutual invitations with Lady Bowes (a fellow Northern Calvinist who patronised a number of radical Protestant divines; see ibid.: 218), and her visits to London following the accession of James (in April–June 1603, November 1604, and February 1605) were clearly part of her “activism” (ibid.: 220). From a historical vantage point, Hoby’s frequent records of sociable dinners, communal readings, and walks in the fields are easily read as leisured pastimes; but for an early modern Reformist such as Lady Margaret, these activities were meaningful religious duties, as they served the purpose of promoting Protestantism in a region that still very much adhered to the old Catholic faith. Indeed, Hoby’s diary echoes a plethora of Calvinist intertexts: most notably, William Perkins’s Golden Chaine, Richard Grenham’s A Treatise of the Sabbath, Richard Rogers’s A Fountain of Teares, and Nicholas Bownde’s Doctrine of the Sabbath plainely layde forth. William Perkins, the author whom Hoby mentions most frequently, actually makes an explicit

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comparison between account books and self-examination (see also ibid.: 66), as he recommends to keep “bills of receipt [of] graces, blessings and gifts” and “bills of expenses” to “redeem […] time profitably or wastefully spent” (Perkins 1970: 474). Hoby follows these instructions meticulously, recording the time she thus spent, profitably or unprofitably. The list-­ quality of her diary is therefore anything but accidental. It is largely prefigured by the religious literature she reads. As Sharon Seelig suggests, Hoby’s diary can be regarded as a “stewardship of time” (2006: 16) in which the events are moulded to fit into the grid recommended by the Calvinist divines. One is therefore tempted to conclude that Hoby does not use her diary to construct interiority, but simply as a means to justify her use of time. However, she does provide considerable hints as to her pious inwardness, as the following two entries will illustrate: Thursday 6 [September 1599] after I praied I did goe about in to the house, and then eate my breakfast, and after did see my hunnie ordered, and then to dinner : after which I wrought, and walked about with Mr Hoby, nothinge reading nor profitinge my selfe or any, the Lord pardon my ommitiones and Commitions, and giue me his spiritt to be watchfull to redeme the time : then I went to priuat praier and examenation, after to supper and lector, and so to bed. (2001: 15) Friday 14 [September 1599] After order taken for the house, and priuat praers, I writt notes into my testament and then brak my fast : after, I wrought, and kept Mr Hoby compenie tell almost diner time : then I praied and, after dinner, I walked awhill and went to church Wth Mr Hoby, and when I Cam home wrought tell 6:, then examened my selfe and praied, walked tell supper time : then I hard the Lector, and after wrought a whill, and so went to bed: Lord, for Christs sack, pardone my drousenes which, with a neclegent mind, caused me to ommitt that medetation of that I had hard, which I ought to haue had. (2001: 17)

On a purely formal level, these entries are very dry, chronologically documenting Hoby’s dutiful fulfilment of her daily chores and religious obligations. However, on both days, the diarist mentions having a guilty conscience and thus brings an inward perspective to her enumerative recitation of events. Her sense of guilt stems from “improper” use of time: on Thursday, Hoby has neglected her “medetation”, which she considers a

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serious breach of her religious duty. Her diary functions both as a spiritual “balance sheet” (Mendelson 1985: 187), documenting her use of time, and as a medium to record the ensuing spiritual anxiety and the promise for self-improvement. Thus, it gives considerable evidence of an interiority that emerges in connection with religious duties. The same is true for the entry dated Friday 14, 1599. As usual, Hoby starts with a vague report of her chores, which includes prayer, self-­ examination, needlework, writing, and, apparently, keeping her husband company. However, she again closes with mentioning her guilty conscience. This particular entry conveys a sense of emotional urgency, including the exclamation: “Lord, for Christs sack, pardone my drousenes”. She does not simply record time as it passes, but also her use of time and its religious relevance. Time—past, present, and future—is not a commodity she can dispose of at her leisure, but something lent to her for a specific purpose. If she “misspends” it, she feels guilt and anxiety. For Hoby, narrating time in her journal is a reminder (for herself) to treat time responsibly. Time and the various ways in which she spends it are crucial components in her relationship to God. She thus narrates her daily life along “heterological” (Lobsien 1996) lines, as she constructs her journal entries in a meaningful relation towards a transcendental alterity. Hoby’s diary documents how her concept of time and, indeed, all other ways of measuring a life take place under God’s constant gaze. Hence, the diurnal format of her writing is not trivial or accidental, but very meaningful. Hoby’s use of the diurnal form provides a sense of coherence or “narrative identity” (Ricoeur 1991b) in the clutter of the everyday. Unlike the late-Romantic subject that Ricoeur envisions in his theory of identity, Hoby creates concordance in terms of repetition, not in terms of plot. Her identity as elect, which hinges on her use of time, must be articulated again and again—it needs to be repeated ad infinitum. In one of the few lengthier entries in the year 1605, Hoby writes about the necessity of keeping a diary, a meta-commentary on her own writing practice in which she confesses that she feels guilty about her “neccligence”: April 1605: The first day Mr Rhodes peached in the Morninge : Mr Hunter, his father in Law, and he, after the Sarmon, took possision of Vnderill his house to Mr Hobys vse and mine : at Night I thought to writ my daies Iournee as before, because, in the reading over some of my former spent time, I funde

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some profitt might be made of that Course from which, thorow two much neccligence, I had a Longe time dissisted: but they are vnwrthye of godes bennefites and especiall fauours that Can finde no time to make a thankfull recorde of them. (2001: 210–11)

In this entry, Hoby writes about the events of 1st April, but also about the importance of writing itself, in which she hopes she might “funde some profitt”. She goes on to frame her own negligence in terms of a logic of salvation and damnation that holds for every Christian, as she adopts an anonymous voice, probably recalling the “Sarmon” she heard earlier that day: “they [my emphasis] are vnwrthye of godes bennefites […] that Can finde no time to make a thankfull recorde of them”. For Hoby, it is a universally accepted truth that time is a precious gift that must be treated carefully, and the use of time should be dutifully recorded. Thus, time plays a crucial role in Hoby’s diary on more than one level. Time and its use form the texture of the religious backdrop against which Reformists like Hoby write. Moreover, time shapes the formal make-up of the text itself: the date that precedes each entry; the open-ended structure of the text, which mirrors the open-ended struggle to discern God’s will; the use of repetition, which is not a stylistic device but a result of the daily mode of composition. The diarists’ construction of time thus differs considerably from that of Reformist writers such as Bunyan, whose Grace Abounding is more clearly teleological, more Ricoeurian, as it were, as it attempts to represent a life in its totality. Bunyan, like later generations of autobiographers, may indeed create “concordance” of “disconcordant elements” (Ricoeur 1991a: 21), as he integrates disruptive and contingent events into the plot of his life. By contrast, it is impossible to read Hoby’s diurnal identity in terms of teleological plot structures. Her conflict with her sinful impulses (an impulse to neglect her evening prayer, for instance) is never resolved in a “happy ending”, but only temporarily, on a particular day, at a specific moment, and it resumes again the next day. Unlike later Reformist autobiographers, Hoby does not fuse past memories, present experiences, and future plans into a “temporal totality” (Ricoeur 1991a: 22). “Totality” is created by reciting the same routine and dutifulness over and over again. The repetitive structure of Hoby’s diary, which mirrors and underscores its repetitive content, might strike “us” as boring, but for Hoby, repetition and routine are likely to have been reassuring.

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“Body and Soule” The dry tone and the routine pattern of Hoby’s diary are hardly ever broken, except in the passages in which she writes about minor ailments. Illness was a matter of much concern in the radical Protestant sects. God was supposed to inflict “castigatory punishment” on the elect (Lake 1982: 150) as a sign of providence (see also Lamb 1999: 70). Thus, Calvinist practical theology suggested to develop not just a watchful sense of self, but also a watchful sense of embodiment, to pay attention to minor ailments, and to keep a record thereof. This might explain why we can witness an almost obsessional concern with bodily well-being in Hoby’s diary: [1599] Friday after dinner, it pleased [the Lord], for a Iust punishment to corricte my sinnes, to send me febelnis of stomak and paine of my head, that kept me vpon my bed tell 5: a clock : at which time I arose, haveinge release of my sickness, according to the wonted kindnes of the Lord, who, after he had Let me se how I had offended, that so I might take better heed to my body and soule hereeafter, with a gentle corriction let me feele he was reconsiled To me. (Hoby 2001: 7)

In this entry, Hoby describes her body in a holistic way, which does not translate into the Cartesian division between the body and the mind, in which the body is pictured as a “container” (“res extensa”) for the higher cognitive capacities of the soul (“res cogitans”) (see Descartes 1985: 59–60). Rather, Hoby writes about her body as if it was “porous” (Kern Paster et  al. 2004: 16), subject to spiritual forces and magically cured through divine interventions. The passage constructs the body as a direct recipient of God’s wrath, a vessel for God’s “Iust punishment”. Through her body, Hoby can picture the “wonted kindnes of the Lord”. If she remains receptive to His “gentle corriction”, she will “feele he was reconsiled” to her. Therefore, an inner sense of passive receptivity provides an enabling moment in her faith. Hoby does not construct faith in terms of individual choice (even the “godly” choice to resist temptation), but in terms of obedience. She ascribes to God many of the motivations, experiences, and feelings that “we” (readers in the twenty-first century) would locate inside of ourselves. Hoby thus articulates a sense of self which is not just “decentered”—as Derrida would put it—but which never had a centre in the first place.

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Hoby’s identity as passive recipient is not only, or not exclusively, a religious construct but also, more generally, a culture-specific response to a material reality. It tells us much about what it must have been like to live in a historical moment in which life was extremely precarious. Hoby wrote before the age of modern medicine and hence was quite literally helpless in the face of diseases. This is particularly present in many entries between the summer 1603 and the spring 1605, in which Hoby mentions repeatedly, and with an increasing sense of urgency, how the plague spreads from the South of England (London and Whitby) to her part of Yorkshire (191–195). She notes the numbers of the dead in London—124 on 24 August 1603, 3200 in the first week of September (Hoby 2001: 191)— which resonates in 2020 as we stare at our phones tracing the casualties of the Covid-19 pandemic, waiting for the curve to flatten. However, and here our cultural construct differs from Hoby’s, she interprets the pandemic along religious lines: The 23 day [October 1603] this day I hard the plauge was so great at whitbie that those [who] were cleare shut themselues vp, and the infected that escaped did goe abroad : Likewise it was reported that, at London, the number was taken of the Liuing and not of the deed : Lord graunt that these Iudgmentes may Cause England wt speed to tourne to the Lord.

As much as Hoby’s entry resonates with the 2020 sense of paranoia and beleaguerment, it also articulates a Calvinist hope for salvation that speaks to Hoby’s own historical moment. For Hoby, the plague is a “Iudegmen[t]” that she hopes “may Cause England wt speed to tourne to the Lord”. Where “we” hope for a vaccine, Hoby hopes for more spiritual cures. The historical alterity of Hoby’s text is particularly conspicuous in entries in which she writes about medicine. Hoby herself acted as midwife, druggist, and doctor in the village (see Hoby 2001: 60). In the following passage, Hoby relates the death of her physician and friend, Dr. Brewer (Moody 2001, qtd. in Hoby: 13; FN 34): [1599] Friday 31 I hard of the sudden Death of Doctor Brewer, Procured by a medeson he minestred to him selfe to Cause him to sleep: I was much greued for it, because of the familiaritie I had with him, and good I had receiued from, but, after better aduice, I found the mercie and power of god shewed in openinge his eies thouchinge me, and shuttinge them against him selfe, by

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Causinge him to haue great Care of ministringe vnto me, and so little for his owne saftie : therefore I may truly conclude it is the Lord, and not the phisision, who both ordaines the medesine for our health and orderethe the ministring of it for the good of his children, closinge and vnclosinge the Iudgmentes of men at his pleasure : therefore let euerie one phisision and pactente Call vpon the Lord for a blessing. (2001: 12–3)

Here, Hoby starts with relating her grief (“greu[e]”), ensuing from Doctor Brewer’s sudden death. Intriguingly, Hoby immediately frames this event and the emotions connected with it in the ideological grid of her faith. The next phrase, which is introduced by the insertion “but, after better aduice”—indicating that she has conferred with Master Rhodes— illustrates that she considers her mourning for Master Brewer to be inappropriate. She continues by explaining that Dr. Brewer had been overeager and never actually had the capacity and the authority to heal: it is the Lord who “ordaines the medesine for our health and orderethe the ministring of it for the good of his children”. Hoby thus portrays Dr. Brewer as a person who did not know his place. There is the sense that the grief she experienced at Dr. Brewer’s loss is a “forbidden mourning”, but she nevertheless mentions it and finds ways to frame the emotion in terms of her faith. As readers in the twenty-first century, we might not be able to relate to Hoby’s religious language, and we might even find it bizarre; but for the diarist, such religious framings of emotion were significant and offered solace. On a more general level, Hoby interprets the episode as a lesson about spiritual hierarchies. According to the Calvinist worldview, no human being can be trusted over God. Hoby, however, had trusted Dr. Brewer, who, in turn, had trusted himself in his abilities as a physician. Dr. Brewer’s death then reminds her that she needs to trust God and not His creatures. Her sentimental feelings about Dr. Brewer’s death are an impediment to her learning and thus need to be rejected or, at minimum, tamed.

Pious Inwardness Hoby may not always be very detailed and explicit, but she gives some very significant clues about the state of her interiority. She grieves for Dr. Brewer but finds “mercie” in God. She feels bad about her drowsiness but knows how to interpret such bodily symptoms as God’s “Iust

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punishment[s]”. As Mary Ellen Lamb suggests in her study of Hoby’s reading practices, [Hoby] provides considerable indirect information concerning the inwardness she developed as a Calvinist woman through the books she reads, through her documentation and interpretation of and through her accounting for her time. […] Hoby uses books by contemporary authors such as William Perkins and Richard Greenham to determine which activities are profitable. These practices combine the primary purpose of Hoby’s diary, as a “Course of examenation” […] through which she perceived, or attempted to perceive, her inward self through the gaze of God. Only through his scrutiny could she discern her ‘true identity’—that is, whether she were elect or reprobate. Good deeds could not change her destiny. (1999: 66)

Lamb suggests that Hoby’s identity is predicated upon adhering to religious norms, and upon conformity and obedience. Hoby, an avid reader of Perkins, knows that she will never be able to save herself through pious behaviour, but that she depends on God’s grace for salvation. The concomitant sense of passivity is illustrated in formulaic phrases such as “it pleased god”, which she uses repetitively: “After I was redie I betooke my selfe to priuat praier, wherin it pleased the Lord to Deall mercifully” (Hoby 2001: 3); “after dinner, it pleased [the Lord] for a Iust punishment to corricte my sinnes, to send me febelnis of stomak and paine of my head” (ibid.: 7); “it pleased god to fre me from sunderie temptation” (ibid.: 60; my emphasis). Thus, not just Hoby’s reading practices but also the verbal structure of her journal is illustrative of a sense of identity that it is theocentric rather than anthropocentric and passive rather than active. Hoby constructs her identity in terms of inwardness, but it is an inwardness under God, not the inwardness of the Romantic subject who struggles for individual self-expression and autonomy. Her inner life emerges in the tension between “divine and human observation” (Maus 1995: 11). It hinges upon the attempt to replicate God’s gaze (however imperfectly) so as to develop a raised awareness for her own fallibility. This painful self-­ awareness provides a clue to her “true identity” (Lamb 1999: 66) as elect, but she can never be sure of her salvation. In her study Inwardness and the Theater of the English Renaissance, Katherine Eisaman Maus argues that the early modern era is concerned with the tension between “inward disposition and outward behaviour” (1995: 19). This tension manifests itself not only in early modern drama

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but also in philosophical explorations on the problem of other minds such as Thomas Wright’s (1971) Passions of the Minde. Among the theological authors who address the question of inwardness is William Perkins, who distinguishes between a human vision that is fallible, partial, and superficial, and a divine vision that is infallible, complete, and penetrating. Without a continued tension between divine and human observation, human inwardness—constituted as it is by a difference between those scrutinies—would seem for Perkins to collapse. (Maus 1995: 11)

As Katherine Eisaman Maus demonstrates, inwardness is not an imposition of the contemporary reader onto the historical text, but a concept that was already available in early modern thought. The distinction between inner feeling and outward ritual was particularly attractive for the dissenting sects (Maus 1995: 19). Alan Sinfield explains the importance of human inwardness in Calvinist thought: Both Catholicism and neoplatonic humanists encouraged a belief in a continuity between human and divine experience; that one might school one’s soul and rise from one to the other. Protestantism insisted on the gap between the two, emphasizing the utter degradation of humankind and the total power of God to determine who shall be saved. (Sinfield 1992: 144)

Thus, Protestant interiority is constituted by the tension between God’s perfect divine vision and the subject’s own inadequacy. The “gap” Sinfield and Maus describe here is certainly present in Hoby’s diary. Hoby’s text conveys an overhang in religious obligations, which she attempts to fulfil. These obligations are not just a matter of outward performance, of churchgoing, praying, working diligently, and so forth, although these issues do matter, of course. But, crucially, it is also Hoby’s religious duty to watch her inner sentiments and to match them against the ideals described in the pious tracts she reads. In the process, Hoby never actually manages to entirely replicate God’s gaze as she has to rely on her own, fallible powers of observation. If she managed to double God’s gaze perfectly (which, of course, is an impossibility), her diurnal log of activities would cease to be necessary. Also, her interiority would merge with that of God and thus be non-existent (see Lamb 1999: 72).

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Keeping a diary is an important instrument for developing such a pious, watchful, self-reflexive interiority. As Hoby can never be sure of her salvation, the sequential, diurnal pattern of her diary is indispensable: Hoby needs to ask herself every day, again and again, which scriptures she read, whether she indulged in idle pleasures or remained disciplined, whether she prayed devoutly or mechanically, and hence whether she spent her time profitably or unprofitably. Hoby’s diary articulates the contradictions inherent in Protestant thought rather than resolving them. Self-monitoring does not actually serve as a tool to improve the diarist and does not aid her in her struggle against her unruly body, which is too “drowsy” to pray properly or which otherwise leads her to neglect her duty. As an avid reader of Perkins, Hoby would have believed that she was prone to sin despite her best intentions. Following Perkins’s thought, Hoby would have “known” that she could only be saved through divine intervention. Characteristically, Hoby’s interiority is not a “blank slate” as Barker would call it, but it emerges in an unequal dialogue with a stern metaphysical authority. In this sense, Hoby’s diary is Freudian rather than Foucauldian. Self-­ monitoring does not actually serve as a tool to improve the diarist and does not aid her in her attempt to civilise her unruly body, but it only creates moments of self-awareness. It is in these moments that she discerns, if fleetingly, her identity as a good Christian. Her dutifulness, her feelings of relief and gratitude, her painful realisation of her inadequacy, her capacity to read illness as “punishment” are steps in her struggle to discern God’s will. Hoby knows that she is bound to “sin” again, however hard she may try to be pious and obedient. Like the subject constructed in Freud’s theory, she is not really in control of what she does. Furthermore, her watchful, Calvinist sense of self is marked by a very specific affectivity: by guilt, anxiety, self-loathing, and pain. Although she does not write as frankly and elaborately about her emotional as later diarists (such as Josselin or Pepys), she is not entirely silent about her emotions either. Hoby is quite explicit with respect to her affective life in a few passages. Significantly, these passages concern her alleged wrongdoings and her ensuing religious anxiety, as the very first entry of her diary illustrates:

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[1599] Thursday day was deadnes in praier, and my greatest offence was want of sorrow for the same : the Lord of his mercie increase true and fervent mourninge vnto god that he neuer take his spiritt from me amen amen. (2001: 3)

Here, Hoby reproaches herself for neither praying nor regretting her lack of discipline. Thus, religion is not just a matter of ritual and appropriate behaviour but also of responding with an appropriate feeling. “[M]ourninge” and anxiety seem to be acceptable, even desirable, when they occur in a spiritual context and produce godly behaviour. Echoing Calvin, Hoby attempts to feel her own depravity, which she interprets as a sign of God’s love. I will quote from another episode to discuss the interplay between godly behaviour and pious interiority in Hoby’s diary. In it, Hoby relates an episode in which she is so plagued by toothache that she cannot perform her religious duties: [1600] The :5: day of the weke :28: After priuat praers I did eate, went about diuerse thinges in the house with some paine of the toothach : after diner I talked a whill with an neighboure, but, beinge in great paine, was forced to vse diuerse medesons that did little profett, for, all the next day and all the week after, I to goe out of my chamber, nor the lordes day after, which was the 9 of March I durst not goe to the Church, which was much greffe vnto me, beinge by that means depriued of the word and Sacramentes : and, though I know the Lord is powerfull And hath promised to keep his Children without the meanes, when he doth not afford them vnto them, yet, when he depriueth them of the ordenarie Instrumentes wherby he hath promised to Coneaye his graces vnto His people for their sinnes, ther is great Cause of sorowe and greffe, tell it please the Lord, by his spiritt, to Certefie agan that their sinnes are pardoned : which Confort I had vpon the lordes euen, when, after ernest Inuocation, I had my paine taken away and assurance of godes Loue: and, from that time, felt no more paine. (2001: 65)

The passage implies that the physical pain is not half as bad as the “greffe” the diarist feels about not being able to go to church and receiving the sacraments. The entry conveys the sense that she is afraid that she has angered God with her “sinnes” and therefore begs his forgiveness, as she writes, “tell it please the Lord, by his spiritt, to Certefie agan that their sinnes are pardoned”. The language in the entry shifts back and forth between faith—“the Lord is powerfull”—and a modicum of doubt as

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Hoby laments that God deprives “[his children] of the ordenarie Instrumentes wherby he hath promised to Coneaye his graces vnto His people for their sinnes”. Hoby most likely interpreted the event as a test for her faith and, hence, an assurance of being “elect”. She attempts to establish order in the emotional chaos in praying to God and feeling reassured of his “Loue” and enigmatically free from pain. A crucial component in Hoby’s struggle for emotional moderation is her willingness to suffer “sorowe and greffe” and, thus, to succumb to God’s will and actually enjoy His castigations. The ambivalent interiority in-between pleasure and pain that Hoby constructs here echoes her Calvinist upbringing and reading practices. She draws on the idea that the elect are particularly prone to feel “sorowe and greffe” about their sins. In Hoby’s view, these negative emotions are (paradoxically) part of the realisation of being saved. Feeling guilty establishes the true identity of the elect and is therefore actually a very positive emotion. As I suggested earlier, the emotional blending of pleasure and pain, of self-loathing and enjoyment, is encapsulated in Lacan’s theory of jouissance. Jouissance is the affective underside of fulfilling a normative duty. It is what Hoby points to when she writes that she rests assured of “godes Loue”. In submitting herself completely to God’s wisdom and repenting her “sinnes”, she (paradoxically) feels the jouissance of being part of the elect. Shortly before Christmas, Hoby notes: Saterday the 22: [December 1599] […] att 5 a Clock, I returned to my Closett vnto priuat examenation and praier : then I went to supper, after to the Lector, and Lastly to priuat praers and preperation to the supper of the Lord by takinge an account what breaches I had made in my faith, since I found that I had itt, by reparinge those by repentance, as also medetating what grace I had, what benifetes godes spiritt ther did offer me, if I Came rightly, and worthyly, both of person and vsag: and so I went to bed. (2001: 46)

Here, Hoby relates that she monitors her faith, keeping an “account” of her “breaches” and, in so doing, fills herself with “repentance”. This sense of guilt and penitence actually brings about some relief and even the sense that she can “repair” the damage by feeling guilty for it. She explicitly articulates her sense of relief and gratitude in the closing sentence of the entry, in which she writes that she “medetat[es]” on the “grace” she has

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received from the Lord. Therefore, she can go to bed with a clear conscience. The passage represents an intriguing transition from fulfilment of duty (self-monitoring, writing the journal), to articulating guilt, penitence, but also gratitude. The multifarious interiority (fear of an authority, guilt and ambivalent joy) is precisely what the concept of jouissance encapsulates. Only very rarely does Hoby appear to be unequivocally happy about her behaviour, as on 27 March 1600, when she notes “hauing no distractions or temptations felte more then ordenarie, so that I found great Cause to praise god who is the giuer of all true Comfort what soeuer” (2001: 69). On a more abstract level, Hoby presents us with two different aspects of herself. Hoby constructs a self that watches, surveys, and critically examines the other version of the self, which is unruly and has apparently made some serious “breaches”. For Hoby, the process of self-monitoring leads to a feeling of “repentance”, which then restores or “rep[airs]” the damage done by the more unruly part of herself. In meditating on her “breaches”, in feeling earnest guilt and penitence, she develops a pious, obedient affectivity, a jouissance, which blends pain, guilt, and enjoyment. This affective piety hinges on an earnest introspective regard, on a splitting of the self into a part which controls and judges and a part that is being watched over, controlled, and judged. For further illustration, I will quote from one more passage also discussed in Mary Ellen Lamb’s study of Hoby: The:18: [July 1600] […] I Came to publeck praers and, after, to priuat, wher I please the lord to touch my hart with such sorow, for some offence Cometted, that I hope the lord, for his sonne sake, hath pardoned it according to his promise, which is ever Iust: after, I reed apaper that wrought a farther humiliation in me, I thanke god. (2001: 99)

As Lamb argues, this passage echoes Hoby’s reading practices, which emphasise human depravity and God’s mercifulness: “[s]eeing her offence through God’s gaze […] achieved redemptive sorrow” (1999: 73). In this context, Lamb questions the extent to which Hoby’s experience of “humiliation” was gendered feminine (ibid.). Translated into the idiom of psychoanalysis, one is tempted to ask if Hoby invokes a mysterious feminine jouissance here, as celebrated in the work of Luce Irigaray (2007, 1993). Irigaray coins the neologism “mystérique” (2007) to vindicate

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feminine mysticism as a primordial form of feminism. According to Irigaray, the mystic, like the hysteric several centuries later, embraces a subversive subjectivity, which undermines the rationalist logic of patriarchal power (2007). However, it may be premature to see Hoby as a “mystérique” in Irigaray’s sense. Calvinist male diarists show a very similar concern with acceptance, dutifulness, and conformity (see Chap. 6). What is more, Hoby’s language is never a language of excess and subversion, which is a central characteristic of Irigaray’s theory of the mystérique, but the idiom of what one could call a spiritual accountant. Hoby only articulates affective interiority in the context of her religious duties. In many entries, Hoby depicts situations that would be considered causes of grief and inner turmoil in the twenty-first century, but she writes in a tone that is placid and matter-of-fact. On 26 August 1601, for instance, she relates an episode in which a nameless villager pleads with her (it would seem, desperately) to perform an operation on her newborn boy who was born with a horrible deformity (the infant had no anal passage). Hoby concludes the entry stating: “I was earnestly intreated to Cutt the place to se if any passhage Could be made, but, I althought I Cutt deepe and seearched, there was none to be found” (2001: 161). Passages like this may have led Lawrence Stone to his often-quoted statement that “feelings were less warm” (1977: 221) in the Renaissance (see also Ariès 1973). Even Sharon Seelig, who characteristically avoids bold conclusions, is tempted to ask: “Did she [Hoby] ever feel anything?” (2006: 21). However, as Seelig herself concedes, the mere fact that Hoby did not write that she feared for the baby’s life or that she felt helpless, does not imply that Margaret Hoby, the historical person, lacked empathy. Hoby’s silence about issues that must have been at least a bit upsetting should not be summarily interpreted as an expression of coldness. As Kern Paster et al. caution us, “modern readers tend to misread early modern emotion codes along specific lines, often parsing emotional control as a lack of feeling and privileging spontaneous and passionate expressions as evidence for authentic experience” (2004: 11). It is very likely that Hoby felt despair when cutting open a newborn infant, although, of course, we can never be entirely sure. What we do know is that she did find it necessary or adequate to write about these emotions. The reason for her silence lies, I would suggest, in her faith, which provides the framework for her writing practices. She only notes her feelings when they connect with the pious inwardness demanded by her Calvinist faith. She may have been

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afraid to hurt the baby or may have felt devastated and helpless when her attempts to save the child failed, but she did not consider her diary the place to write about such emotions.

Summary As the analyses have shown, Margaret Hoby’s journal is pervaded by Reformist piety, which gives her a rationale to write about her life and a structure and form for her narratives. Thus, her journal follows the grid recommended in Calvinist tracts on self-monitoring. It is kept in strict chronological order as the diarist records her daily chores and religious obligations with characteristic diligence. As a result, Hoby’s journal is numbingly repetitive as a text and evokes only a minimal degree of what Monika Fludernik has called “experientiality” (1996: 12). This does not mean, however, that Hoby’s journal is a medium that only looks at outward events and performance and does not entail an inward-looking gaze. Hoby actually uses her diary to construct a specific pious interiority. Keeping a record of her religious duties, Hoby looks at her behaviour with rigorous introspective regard. She not only documents the extent to which she manages the performance of her duties but also asks herself, daily and repeatedly, whether she prayed devoutly (rather than just reciting empty words) or whether she concentrated on her reading (rather than being drowsy), trying to make sure that she is in a proper frame of mind. In the process, Hoby constructs a sense of self that is characterised by receptivity, passivity, and obedience. Hoby’s journal serves as a material medium for self-examination, in which she documents her “sinnes” and “breaches”. The text that emerges out of these restrictive practices provides some proof that she has prayed regularly and, more important, earnestly. It does, of course, also demonstrate when she has not. Thus, the diary is not just a narrative which documents her piety but also a practice within her faith. It serves as a reminder and an incentive to organise her day along the lines of her faith, to avoid idleness, to use her time for prayer and self-examination. Hoby knows that she will have to write about her “breaches”, and perhaps this knowledge prevented her from breaching the norm in the first place. Thus, keeping a diary can very literally take over super-ego functions and evolve into an inner control instance. On the level of its content and verbal structure,

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Hoby’s diary is the site in which the introspective guilt so crucial for Calvinist identity is constructed. The diary can be used to construct the specific affective piety that arises out of conformity and obedience. Furthermore, the diary as a written medium also points outwards, as writing it begets the possibility of someday being read. Keeping a journal, pious women like Hoby could put themselves under a semi-public gaze, and thus were “authorised” to speak and be heard. As a consequence, Hoby’s practice of diary-keeping is both restrictive and paradoxically enabling. It is restrictive because clearly Hoby’s range of agency—already limited through her gender—was even more limited through her rigorous disciplinary schedule; however, it is also conspicuously enabling because it provides a justification for narrating her life. By keeping an account of her piety and obedience, by monitoring her behaviour, Hoby has the possibility to speak and to write as a woman without flouting the norms of her time. Indeed, her journal-keeping was not provocative, since the diarist was protected by a most austere system of piety, which provided both a pattern and a rationale for writing. For this reason, it is difficult to interpret Hoby’s writing as an act of feminist heroism avant la lettre. Neither can she be read as a mystérique who subverts the law of the reason with her excessive speech, nor does she engage in a form of self-fashioning that threatens patriarchal authority. Hoby can more adequately be described as an accountant of piety, an accountant who nevertheless enjoys what she is doing. As I hope to have shown, Hoby’s jouissance arises from her dutifulness and obedience. Hers is not a language of subversion and excess but, on the contrary, a dry and sequential language with only little attention to “qualia”. She leaves hyperbole, imagery, and excess to “popeshe” (120) books. Gender did, of course, have an impact on Hoby as a person and her writing practice. In the early modern era, there was very little to everyday life that was not seriously inflected by gender. However, Hoby does not breach the gendered norms of her time. On the contrary, she constructs herself as a dutiful Christian, as a woman who fulfils her religious and secular duties. Lady Anne Clifford, whose diary I will discuss in the next chapter, is more daring with respect to gender hierarchies and relies on very different strategies to gain voice and agency.

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References Ariès, Philippe. (1973) Centuries of Childhood. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Cahn, Susan (1987) Industry of Devotion: The Transformation of Women’s Work in England 1500–1660. New York: Columbia University Press. Crawford, Julie (2010) “Reconsidering Early Modern Women’s Reading, or, How Margaret Hoby Read Her de Mornay.” Huntington Library Quarterly 73:2. 193–223. ———. (2014) Mediatrix. Women, Politics and Literary Production in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cross, Claire (2008) “Hastings, Katherine, countess of Huntingdon (c.1538–1620).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online. Accessed on 30.08.2016. Descartes, René (1985) The Philosophical Writings. Eds. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fludernik, Monika (1996) Towards a “Natural” Narratology. London: Routledge. Graham, Elspeth, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby, and Helen Wilcox (1989) Her Own Life. Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth Century Englishwomen. London: Routledge. Herman, David (2009) Basic Elements of Narrative. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Hoby, Margaret (2001) The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599–1605. Ed. Joanna Moody. Stroud: Sutton. Houlbrooke, Ralph (1988) English Family Life 1576–1716: An Anthology from the Diaries. Oxford: Blackwell. Irigaray, Luce. (1993). Sexes and Genealogies. Trans. Gillian Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ——— (2007) Je, tu, nous: Toward a Culture of Difference. Ed. Alison Martin. Routledge classics. London/ New York: Routledge. Kern Paster, Gail, Katherine Rowe, and Floyd-Wilson, Mary (2004) Eds. Reading the Early Modern Passions. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lamb, Mary Ellen (2000) “The Sociality of Margaret Hoby’s Reading Practices and the Representation of Reformation Interiority.” Critical Survey 12. 17-32. ——— (1999) “Margaret Hoby’s Diary: Women’s Reading Practices and the Gendering of the Reformation Subject”. Pilgrimage for Love: Essays in Early Modern Literature in Honor of Josephine A. Roberts. Ed. Sigrid King. 63–94. Lake, Peter (1982) Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lobsien [Olejniczak], Verena (1996) “Heterologie. Konturen früneuzeitlichen Selbstseins jenseits von Autonomie und Heteronomie.” Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik. 101: 6–36. Matchinske, Megan (2009) “Serial Identity: History, Gender and Form in the Diary Writing of Lady Anne Clifford.” Anne Clifford and Lucy Hutchinson. Ed. Mihoko Suzuki. Surrey: Ashgate. 203–18.

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Maus, Katherine Eisaman (1995) Inwardness and Theatre in the English Renaissance. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Meads, Dorothy (1930) “Introduction.” The Diary of Margaret Hoby. London: Routledge. 1–61. Mendelson Heller, Sara (1985) “Stuart’s Women’s Diaries and Occasional Memoirs.” Women in English Society, 1500–1800. Ed. Mary Prior. London/ New York: Methuen. 181–210. Moody, Joana (2001) “Introduction” The Private Life on Elizabethan Lady. London: Stroud. xv–lii. Morgan, John (1988) Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning, and Education 1540 and 1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perkins, William (1970) The Work of William Perkins. Ed. Ian Breward. Appleford: The Courtenay Library of Reformation Classics. 362–85. Ricoeur, Paul (1991a) “Life in Quest of Narrative.” On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation. Ed. David Wood. London: Routledge. 20–33. ———. (1991b) “Narrative Identity.” On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation. Ed. David Wood. London: Routledge. 188–199. Seelig, Sharon Cadman (2006) Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women’s Lives, 1600–1680. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sherman, Stuart P. (1996) Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Shuger, Deborah (2000) “Life-Writing in Seventeenth Century England.” Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism. Eds. Patrick Colemann, Jayne Lewis, and Jill Kowalik. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 63–78. Sinfield, Alan (1992) Faultlines. Cultural Materialism and Dissident Reading. Berkeley: University of California Press. Skura, Meredith Anne (2000) “Early Modern Subjectivity and the Place of Psychoanalysis in Cultural Analysis: The Case of Richard Norwood.” Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture. Eds. Peter Brooks and Alex Woloch. New Haven. CT: Yale University Press. 211–21. Stone, Lawrence (1977) The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800. New York: Harper and Row. Warnicke, Retha M. (1983) Women in the English Renaissance and Reformation. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Wright, Thomas (1971) The Passions of the Minde in Generall [1601]. Ed. Thomas O. Sloan. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

CHAPTER 5

Anne Clifford’s “Activist” Diaries

Lady Anne Clifford can be placed among the highest-ranking women of seventeenth-century England, and she was already famous, if not notorious, in her own time. Clifford was engaged in a decade-long struggle for her patrimony, and her diaries played a major part in her campaign. As a result of this struggle, her diary is frequently deemed an “activist” (Matchinske 2009: 203) or even a “protofeminist” (Lewalski 1991: 88) text. The present chapter will revisit the diaries’ role in this struggle, and their somewhat precarious status as a pioneering feminist document. The case of Lady Anne Clifford is further complicated by the fact that she represents her life in a variety of cultural texts. The first and most famous document is variously called Knole Diary (Clifford 2003) or Countess of Dorset’s Diary (Malay 2018), and it covers the years between 1616 and 1619. It usually appears in connection with a short autobiographical text, in which Clifford relates the events following the death of Queen Elizabeth 1603, a watershed in her own life as much as in the history of England. In her recent edition of Clifford’s works, Jessica Malay refers to the 1603 text as “memoir” rather than autobiography, arguing that the latter privileges a strictly crafted narrative form that has been anachronistically applied to the early modern individual, generally male, resulting in the undervaluing, or indeed the inability to recognize, the autobiographical that exists in many types of texts of the period. (Malay 2018: 5) © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Nandi, Reading the Early Modern English Diary, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42327-8_5

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Malay argues that the term “memoir” is more suitable for the early modern period as memoirs relate note only “the life of the writer, but […] her surroundings” (Broker qtd. in Malay 2018: 7). While the term memoir is a good alternative to the loaded term autobiography, it might also be a bit anachronistic, given the memoir’s current cultural prominence outselling all other literary genres (see Miller 2007). Although the 1603 narrative does not fall into the category of diary as outlined in Chap. 2, it nevertheless uses deictic markers such as specific dates to highlight temporal responsibility. The same is true for a second and lesser-known set of texts that cover the years from 1650 onwards and are written as yearly chronicles. In the later years of her life, Anne Clifford also wrote a longer autobiographical narrative titled, “The Life of Me the Lady Anne Clifford, 1589–1649”, which Malay also reads in connection with the memoir genre (2018: 9–11). Clifford resumed the diurnal format in 1676, keeping a “daybook” (Malay 2018) in the last year of her life. It is likely that the 1676 daybook is the only surviving text out of many (Malay 2018: 11). Clifford may very well have used the diurnal form more extensively and frequently than the modern editions suggest. Apart from her autobiographical narratives, Clifford also commissioned the now famous Appleby Triptych, or Great Picture depicting the Clifford family, and was also extensively involved in the construction and renovation of churches and monuments. These material objects are also at times read as self-constructions and linked to Clifford’s autobiographical narratives (see Friedman 2009). In this chapter, I will focus on the full spectrum of Clifford’s autobiographical writing, from the 1603 text to the later narratives in which she uses the diurnal form. Focussing only on those texts that possess all the characteristics of the diary (as laid out in Chap. 2) and setting aside the yearly chronicles or the 1603 memoir would be missing the point of Clifford’s attempt to “creatively construct a meaning of a life” (Bedford et al. 2007: 2). This is not to say that I underestimate the amount of polishing that most likely went into the 1603 memoir and “Life of Me”. Rather, I wish to more closely consider how Clifford blends the enumerative, serial form with more narrativised ways of writing. I suggest locating Clifford’s texts on a spectrum between memoir and diary and investigating the ways in which Clifford’s use of juxtaposition offers solutions for the cultural constraints that the early modern woman writer had to face.

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In what follows, I will explore the connections between the form of Clifford’s autobiographical texts and the potential functions of form in her struggle to regain her patrimony. Clifford, like every woman writer in the early modern period, had to solve the conflict between “self-effacement and self-assertion” (Rose 1986: 247). While this conflict was not always resolved along feminist lines (see Seelig 2006: 9; also Pirnie 1996), it might have been in Clifford’s case. For this reason, I will revisit Barbara Kiefer Lewalski’s (1991) and Mary Ellen Lamb’s (2009) influential readings of Clifford’s narratives. Though they approach Clifford’s texts from very different angles, both Lewalski and Lamb interpret them as documenting an emergent feminist struggle for legal rights (Lewalski 1991: 88). I hope to show that Lewalski’s and Lamb’s readings can be fruitfully amended and qualified by adding a psychoanalytic perspective. As a second step, I will investigate the role and the representation of emotions in Clifford’s diaries. While Clifford does not use her diary as a medium for emotional outpour (see Seelig 2006: 43), she nevertheless writes about affective relationships to near kin both in her early years and much later in her 1676 daybook. I hope to show that such narrative representations of emotions are both strategic and self-articulatory, rather than either of the two. They are polished and rhetorical, but also “object-­ seeking” in a psychoanalytical sense, as Clifford constructs a benevolent listener-figure, an imaginary addressee, to create structure in times of emotional turmoil. Third, I will analyse the function of repetition and serial patterning in Clifford’s autobiographical writing, focussing particularly on her later texts, which are particularly “place and time-obsessed” (Matchinske 2009: 210). Following up on Matchinske’s reading, I suggest that there is a correlation between the accumulative, repetitive structure of the diaries on the one hand and Clifford’s precarious status as female landowner on the other. The diaries do not just serve an evidentiary purpose in the struggle to regain her patrimony, they also attest to a notion of female personhood that is “cumulative, activist, and anticipatory” (ibid.: 203). At the same time, the narrative structure of Clifford’s diaries also quite ingeniously foreshadows some of the tenets of feminist psychoanalysis, thus appearing to be less “anxious” (ibid.: 210) than Matchinske assumes. In her own way, Anne Clifford ingeniously fuses what Julia Kristeva has called “symbolic” and “semiotic” language (1976). Lady Anne connects factual narration with less tangible temporal registers by relating specific times and events while also constructing a curious private numerology. In doing so,

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she establishes connections between different times and generations. She draws on powerful paternal figures but also initiates a female kinship line.

Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676): A “Protofeminist”? Lady Anne Clifford was born on 30 January 1590 at Skipton Castle in Craven, Yorkshire, as the only surviving child of George Clifford, Third Earl of Cumberland (1558–1608), one of Elizabeth’s “most flamboyant courtiers” (Seelig 2006: 24), and Lady Margaret (1560–1616), née Russell. The death of Queen Elizabeth and the accession of James I meant that Anne, who had spent a considerable time of her childhood at court, was less favoured at court as she grew up (Acheson 1995: 78). Her first journal entries, written in 1603 when she was barely 13, articulate a certain sense of frustration about the loss of social status. Lady Anne was married twice; first to Richard Sackville, the Third Earl of Dorset in 1609, and after being widowed for six years, to Phillip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke in 1630 (see Acheson 1995: 78; Suzuki 2009: xxix). Both her family lineage and her marriages placed her among the elite of seventeenth-century England. Neither of the two marriages was happy (see Seelig 2006: 24), but the relationship with Sackville was particularly fraught. One of the issues that gave rise to marital conflict was Anne Clifford’s struggle to regain her patrimony. Her father George had willed his title and estates away from Anne to his brother and Anne’s paternal uncle Francis Clifford (1559–1641). This was not unusual at the time (see Matchinske 2009: 204), but according to a deed dating from the reign of Edward II, these were entailed upon “the heir of the body […] regardless of sex” (Acheson 1995: 78, see also Lewalski 1991: 90, Lamb 1998: 12). Therefore, the Northern estates and titles were legally Anne’s (Matchinske 2009: 204–5). Supported by her mother Margaret, Anne Clifford refused to acquiesce in a settlement that worked to her disadvantage (Acheson 1995: 78, see also Suzuki 2009: xii). The ensuing lawsuit was one of “the most publicized and celebrated marital property disputes of the seventeenth century” (Suzuki 2009: xii; see also Erikson 1993: 111). Her husband Richard Sackville pressured her to agree to a cash settlement: he threatened her with social shaming and withdrawal of the servants (Acheson 1995: 78), and eventually he took their daughter Margaret, then their only surviving

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child, into custody. The entries in May 1616 tell of Anne’s passionate (and unsuccessful) attempts to get Margaret back. They are also the only entries in which Anne writes about her emotional life in more detail. Despite considerable pressure and opposition from her husband, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and even King James I himself, Anne refused to sign her rights away. It was this refusal to sign the cash settlement which enabled her to inherit the property after her uncle died without male issue in 1643 (Acheson 1995: 79, Klein 2001: 18). Only posthumously in 1691 was she assigned the title of Baroness (Acheson 1995: 79). Lady Anne not only survived all her male ancestors and relatives, but also the Civil War. Her Northern castles had been a stronghold for the royalist side during the Civil War but were left intact. From the 1650s onwards, the diarist established herself in her castles of Brougham, Brough, Appleby, and Skipton. There, she financed and curated the restoration of churches and supported the arts and commissioned a family history. Until her death in 1676, Clifford kept a record of her life. Anne Clifford’s autobiographical writings were introduced to the greater reading public by Vita Sackville-West, who traced her own heritage to Clifford’s first husband Richard Sackville. In her 1923 edition of the diary, Sackville-West announced her solidarity with the early woman writer and thus set a landmark for later generations of feminist critics. Second-­ wave feminists read Clifford’s writings as testimonials of the power of matrilineal kinship relations. In this vein, Barbara Kiefer Lewalski in her landmark essay, titled “Re-Writing Patriarchy and Patronage”, showed that Anne’s struggle was masterminded and supported by her mother Margaret so that the “enabling factor [in the struggle] was Anne Clifford’s emphasis on matrilineal heritage and kinship network” (1991: 92). Lewalski juxtaposed Clifford’s autobiographical text with the poetic work of Aemilia Lanyer, suggesting that both women writers offered “a proto-­ feminist challenge to ideologies and institutions at the centre of Jacobean culture” (ibid.: 88). More recently, taking her cue from Lewalski, Lisa Klein has suggested that Clifford’s identity as mother and grandmother “undergirds and is inseparable from her identity as aristocratic landowner, writer and family historian” (2001: 32). According to Klein, Clifford intended to preserve her patrimony for her daughters and grandchildren, thus positioning herself as a powerful matriarch in the tradition of her mother. In contrast to Lewalski and Klein, Mary Ellen Lamb argues that Clifford inserts herself into an “ungendered or even male-gendered subject

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position as a reader of the patriarchal canon” (2009: 46). In Lamb’s view, Lady Anne is endowed with a certain amount of agency and “power to choose between a model of subject positions offered by a number of discontinuous discourses” (ibid.: 44). Clifford’s agency derives from her reading activities, since “her occupation of the role of implied (male) reader of these works apparently facilitated her assumption of the traditionally male role of landowner” (ibid.: 45). Both of these readings are themselves quite historically specific: Lewalski and Klein draw on the fruitful discussion of second-wave feminism, and the ensuing interest in recovering a feminine and feminist tradition of autobiography, which crucially departs from patriarchal models. Neither Lewalski nor Klein embraces a feminist psychoanalytic framework, but their studies overlap with important concerns of second-wave feminist psychoanalysis, such as celebrating female solidarity and relationality (see Chodorow 1978; Cixous 1980, 1986). The aforementioned critics appear to (at least partly) agree with Cixous’s famous tenet that women’s speech can only be authentic if it is freed from the shackles of patriarchy. For Cixous, the ultimate aim of women’s speech is to “blow up the law […] with laughter”, even though for early modern women, such attempts were clearly precarious (1980: 245). Conversely, Mary Ellen Lamb’s reading is situated in the debates of third-wave feminism and feminist interventions in the new historicism. Lamb’s concern is the “dismantlement of the transcendental or essentialist subject as a mask for self-interested efforts to maintain a white, male, upper-class status quo” (1992: 43). For this reason, her essay is more wary of essentialist constructions of female solidarity, although she does acknowledge the need for recuperating the subject as agent at least in a certain way. “[W]ithout discounting the power of ideologies and cultural practices”, she suggests that the subject is endowed with the capacity to “choose between a number of subject positions offered by a number of discontinuous discourses” (ibid.: 44). Thus, according to Lamb, Anne Clifford can insert herself “into the subject position of landowner” (ibid.: 45) by constructing herself as a reader of the male canon. More recently, early modern gender criticism, while acknowledging the ground-breaking nature of the work of Lewalski and Lamb, has cautioned us against “gerrymandering” the past for contemporary feminist purposes (Seelig 2006: 9). As Sharon Seelig (2006) and Ulrike Tancke (2010) remind us, it is problematic to read feminist heroism back into the past, as the early modern notion of the ideal woman as “silent, chaste, and

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obedient” was “pervasive” at the time (ibid.: 7, see also Hull 1982; Stone 1977). Although early modern women’s actual silence may have been overstated by historians such as Hull and Stone, the cultural codes of conduct clearly prescribed women’s silence. Women who breached the rule were viewed as “sexually incontinent” (Tancke 2010: 7), since speech was equated with sexual licence. Writing for publication was an even “greater taboo” (ibid.: 8). While Margaret Hoby could draw on a religious model for writing and was thus protected by an ideology of domestic piety, Anne Clifford took a much greater risk in claiming not just authorship but also the status of landowner. In what follows, I will analyse to what extent Clifford’s early work articulates an emergent feminist consciousness. I will investigate the various ways in which Clifford constructs herself as the bearer of legal personhood. The importance of her mother Margaret in this struggle can hardly be overstated. For these reasons, it is necessary to at least partly revisit and to recuperate Lewalski’s early feminist reading. At the same time, however, I suggest to qualify her reading and to explore the unacknowledged debt to feminist psychoanalytic criticism in her interpretation.

Echoes and Mirrors Clifford’s first piece of autobiographical writing relates the events of the year 1603 when she was only 13. It is a text that stands out for its “remarkable freshness and immediacy” ( Seelig, Sharon 2006: 36). Yet, the fresh tone in Clifford’s writing should not deflect our attention away from its concern with power and rank. Even at this young age, Anne Clifford never separates dynastic matters from private matters. Already in this early text, she constructs herself as a member of court society in the context of shifting power relation, as the opening passage of her 1603 narrative illustrates: In Christmas I used to go much to the Court, and sometimes I did lie in my aunt Warwick’s chamber on a pallet, to whom I was much bound for her continual care and love of me, in so much as if Queen Elizabeth had lived she intended to prefer me to be of the Privy Chamber. For at that time there was much hope and expectation of me both for my person and my fortunes as of any other young lady whatsoever. A little after the Queen removed to Richmond she began to grow sickly. […] Upon the 24th Mr. Flocknell, my aunt Warwick’s man, brought us word from his Lady that the Queen died about two [or] three of the clock in the morning. This message was d ­ elivered

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to my mother and me in the same chamber where afterwards I was married. About ten of the clock King James was proclaimed in Cheapside by all the Council with great joy and triumph, which triumph I went to see and hear. (2018: 15)

Anne Clifford emphasises her proximity to the centre of power, relating that she spends the festive season at court. What is more, she claims that the late Queen Elizabeth would have “intended to prefer [her]” had she still been alive. Clifford’s proximity to power is secured through her Aunt Anne Russell, Countess of Warwick, who had long served as one of the late Queen’s ladies of the bedchamber. Anne uses a language of intimacy, but also of mutual obligations to characterise her relationship with her aunt: she writes that she “was bound” to the countess of Warwick by “continual care and love”. Lady Anne goes on to relate that she slept on a “pallet” close to her Aunt’s own bed, thus underscoring her close relationship to one of the Queen’s most influential ladies. Via her Aunt Warwick, Anne is connected to the court, and thus a person to be reckoned with, a person endowed with legal rights. She goes on to record how James I was proclaimed king, noting that he was greeted “by all the Council with great joy and triumph”. Characteristically, however, she does not relate her own emotions with respect to the accession of James. Instead, she simply states that she “went to see and hear” the ceremony. She remains silent about the extent to which she shares the “great joy” of the “council”. This gap is crucial, I think, with respect to the way Anne narrates her position within the workings of courtly power. While her relationship with Aunt Russell (and thus, with the late Queen) is marked by mutual affection, the relationship to the new king is not. King James is merely there, his presence needs to be acknowledged, but there is no affective tie which binds Anne to James. The opening passage of Lady Anne’s early memoir thus announces a theme that will mark all her other autobiographical texts and the diaries in particular—the powerful presence both of patriarchal authority and of an emergent feminist consciousness that is supported by a network of female kinship relations and maternal figures. Her move is unusual and extremely daring, as Jacobean culture indeed was a “regressive period for women, as a culture dominated by a powerful queen gave way to a Court ethos shaped by patriarchal ideology and homosexuality of James I” (Lewalski 1991: 88). Women’s education witnessed a backlash under James I, and

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misogyny was omnipresent in satire and pamphlets (Lewalski 1991: 88; see also Hull 1982; Nevitt 2006). And yet, the Jacobean era also witnessed a budding of women’s authorship with figures like Aemilia Lanyer, Elizabeth Carey, and Martha Moulsworth. Thus, Anne Clifford’s early autobiographical narrative is written against the backdrop of an emergent discourse of women’s writing, a discourse that had to grapple with the fact that women were regarded as defective speaking subjects, as pale reflections of male authority. Like Martha Moulsworth in her autobiographical poem, “The Memorandum of Martha Moulsworth / Widdowe” (1993), which was of the same period, Clifford seizes agency, voice, and authority by identifying with her father (see Pirnie 1996). However, Moulsworth remains silent about her mother and exclusively identifies with her father’s lineage, whereas Anne Clifford employs a dual strategy: she invokes her father, but, more importantly, her construction of identity rests on the presence of important maternal figures and kinship relations. This is even more conspicuous in the later autobiographical texts that use the diurnal form. To illustrate, I will quote from a passage dated 17 February 1616, in which Lady Anne relates that she was rounded up by a group of the most powerful men in England, all of whom put pressure on her to sign away her inheritance. Anne, however, declines because she wants to consult her mother first: Upon the 17th being Saturday, my Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, my Lord William Howard, my Lord Ros, my cousin. Russell, my brother Sackville and a great company of men of note were all in the gallery at Dorset House where the Archbishop took me aside and talked with me privately one hour and a half and persuaded me both by divine and human means to set my hand to these agreements but my answer to his Lordship was that I would do nothing till my Lady and I had conferred together. (2018: 28)

With historical hindsight, Anne Clifford’s struggle indeed appears to be heroic. She resists the persuasions of the most influential men of her time, the Archbishop of Canterbury among them, invoking her mother. For Anne, her mother Margaret is endowed with more authority than the “divine and human” arguments laid out by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Here, as in many other passages, Anne refuses to abide by the law laid out by paternal, or rather, patriarchal figures. She bows to a higher authority,

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the authority of her mother Margaret. In this vein, she notes in April 1616: “For some two nights my Mother and I lay together and had much talk about this Business” (2018: 31). Thus, she writes about her mother as a confidante, picturing the mother-daughter relationship along intimate lines: they “lay” together “talk[ing]”; she also portrays her mother as occupying a position of authority and knowledge, as a person to whom she can turn in “this business”, that is, the entail. Consequently, Clifford constructs herself and her mother as speaking subjects and bearers of rights, while also emphasising the reassuring, nurturing quality of their relationship. Margaret Clifford is not just portrayed as a mother in the traditional psychoanalytic sense (as part of a dyad, as a lost love object), but as someone to speak to, as a person who is separate from Anne but yet connected to her in conversation. Therefore, Margaret Clifford is both maternal (nurturing, affectionate, intimately connected to Anne) and paternal (separate from her, a person of authority, endowed with speech and agency). Both Anne and Margaret Clifford had a model for such a “doubled” precarious identity in the late Queen Elizabeth—a woman in charge of an unambiguously patriarchal society. In this vein, one might argue that Anne envisions such a dual identity for herself. Furthermore, Anne constructs a whole set of powerful female figures such as Queen Elizabeth, the Countess of Warwick, and Margaret Clifford as models she can emulate. For this reason, Barbara Lewalski’s thesis that Lady Anne’s strategy rests on a “matrilineal heritage and kinship network” (1991: 92) is very plausible. Lewalski’s interpretation can be amended by focussing on the verbal structure of Clifford’s journals. The following entry relates the events of one of the peak moments in Anne’s struggle for her property. As male relatives attempt to force her into compliance, and Anne resorts to a female consort for comfort: [16 February 1616] my cousin Russell came to me the same day and chid me and told me of all my faults and errors in this business and he made me weep bitterly. Then I spoke a prayer and went to see my Lady Wotton [Anne’s first cousin, M.N.] at Whitehall, where we walked five or six turns but spoke nothing of this business, though her heart and mine were full of it. From hence I went to the Abbey of Westminster where I saw the Queen of Scots her tomb and all the other tombs and came home by water where I took an extreme cold. (2018: 28)

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Anne Clifford rarely relates her emotions, but here she is quite frank about them. She writes that she was made to “weep bitterly”. The prayer seems to provide some comfort, but we get a stronger sense of communion and mutual understanding in the next lines, in which Clifford relates that she went to see her cousin Lady Wharton (“Wotton” in the original). The silence between the two women, a silence demanded by the patriarchal law, is nevertheless broken in the wordless mutual understanding suggested in the sentence, “[we] spoke nothing of this business, though her heart and mine were full of it”. Crucially, Anne Clifford breaks this silence in writing her diary. It establishes a “face” in order to face the men that pressure her to give up her titles and lands, as Sharon Seelig suggests (2006: 40). According to Seelig, “Anne Clifford writes […] in the deepest possible sense for herself. She writes to construct her life, to understand it, to place herself in relation to her husband, […] and she writes to justify her actions to herself” (ibid.: 39). Anne Clifford’s diary serves to prepare her for the struggle on the one hand, and it documents and mirrors this conflict on the other. Her diary mirrors her inner and outer struggles against patriarchal power. Thus, it documents her struggle but also organises and structures the emotional turmoil that it entails. However, her diary does not work along Lacanian lines, as the projection of a male-gendered ideal-ego, constructing fantasies of omnipotence and triumphant mastery. It is a far different “mirror” connected with the benevolent, affectionate gaze of the mother. According to Luce Irigaray, the mirror stage, as theorised by Lacan, is extremely gender-specific and only valid with respect to the early development of boys (1980: 71; see also Irigaray 1985). She adds that for the little girl, the experience of seeing her specular image is nothing short of traumatic, as the Lacanian mirror reflects nothing back on the little girl other than her “absence or defect” (Minsky 1996: 195). As Irigaray puts it, “[w]e look at ourselves in the mirror to please someone, rarely to interrogate the state of our own body or our spirit, rarely for ourselves and in search of our own becoming. The mirror almost always serves to reduce us to a pure exteriority” (1993: 65). Anne Clifford’s writings do not display such a desire to please, but the desire to find strength and solace in the face of other women. Thus, her diary can be read along the lines of D.W. Winnicott’s reworking of Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage (2005). Winnicott suggests that “in individual emotional development the precursor of the mirror is the mother’s face” (149; emphasis in original). Departing from Lacan’s model,

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Winnicott points out that individual development hinges upon the relationship with a primary caregiver—usually the mother. It is the mother, not a cold material object such as a mirror, who interacts with the child, echoes its sounds, and mirrors its facial expressions. Only in this interactive process does the child see itself in the gaze of the mother and can thus acquire a primary sense of self (see also Minsky 1996: 11). Clifford’s diary is akin to mirroring in the Winnicottian rather than the Lacanian sense: it reflects back thoughts and emotions, constructing a sense of integrated personhood. The diarist refers to powerful female role models, who might be read as distant mirrors of the past; in the aforecited passage, she invokes Mary Queen of Scots, entombed in Westminster Abbey, and like herself, a subject under trial. Furthermore, Anne Clifford names her first daughter (born in 1614) “Margaret” after her mother. In a break with the Lacanian formula, Clifford emphasises the maternal kinship line. Anne mirrors and echoes her mother Margaret, and her daughter Margaret echoes and mirrors Anne. She marks and continues a line of powerful female figures, who emulate each other’s example, remaining “strong against the storms of fortune” (2018: 98). Anne Clifford does not imitate her father’s role, as the Lacanian dutiful daughter would, but her mother’s. The Knole Diary constructs narrative identity in terms of “a mother-daughter socialization” (Klein 2001: 20) in which domestic and dynastic matters interact. As a practice, keeping a diary echoes and mirrors the relational interactions between women; as a text, it documents, holds, and reflects the presence of powerful women. Another fascinating characteristic of Clifford’s text is the way she writes about her daughter. As the toddler Margaret falls ill, for instance, the diarist confesses that she fears for the child’s life: “Upon the 8th [Feb 1617] the Child had a great fit of her ague again insomuch I was very fearful of her that I could hardly sleep at night, so I beseech God Almighty to be merciful to me and spare her life” (2018: 51). The passage conveys a sense of immediacy, as it switches to the present tense mid-sentence. It is also more conspicuously religious and emotional than most of the other passages of her early diaries. Even if the sense of emotional urgency may have been constructed for strategic purposes—as a way to vindicate herself as a good mother—it nevertheless demonstrates that stressing interpersonal ties between mothers and daughters could be used as a powerful rhetorical tool.

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Fifty-nine years later, only a few months before her own death, Anne Clifford refers to this incident again in her daybook in an entry dated 12 February 1676: The 12th day, I remembered how this day was fifty-nine years [1617] my first and then only child Margaret, after she had been in the garden of Knowle House in Kent, did in the night fall desperately sick of her long ague of which she was in great danger of death, she then lying in a chamber in the tower there, which was underneath my chamber. (2018: 232)

The entry mirrors the earlier passage in terms of its emotional urgency, created through the use of intensifiers such as “desperately” and “great”. It also mirrors the time of the incident as it was written around the same time, in early February. The entry similarly constructs spatial mirrorings: Margaret was “lying in a chamber […], underneath” her mother’s chamber. In using temporal, spatial, and affective mirrorings, Anne Clifford constructs both an affectionate mother-daughter relationship and a sense of power and permanence. Just as the verbal structure of Clifford’s diaries relies on echoes and mirrorings, the diary itself is a mirror reflecting and constructing a variety of images of the diarist—as a subject under trial, as a daughter supported by a nurturing and powerful mother, as a female ruler and landowner, as a caring and affectionate mother. These mirror images are neither exclusively expressive or self-articulatory nor exclusively strategic, but they are situated in an intermediate, transitional space between such distinctions. Throughout his work, Winnicott emphasises “middle positions” and is sceptical of “either-ors” (Honig 2013: 70). To a certain extent, Clifford’s diary is similarly intermediate in the sense that it juxtaposes dynastic and domestic matters rather than setting them apart. Such juxtapositions and connections are present in all of Clifford’s autobiographical texts. While they are particularly striking in her 1676 daybook, they already occur in her 1603 memoir: About this time my aunt of Bath and her Lord came to London and brought with them my Lord Fitzwarren and my cousin Frances Bourchier whom I met at Bagshot, where I lay all night with my cousin Frances Bourchier and Mistress Mary Carey, which was the first beginning of the greatness between us. About five miles from London there met my mother, my Lord of Bedford and his Lady, my uncle Russell and much other company, so that we were in number about 300, which did all accompany them to Bath House, where

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they continued most of that summer, whither I went daily and visited them and grew more inward with my cousin Frances and Mistress Carey. (2018: 18)

Lady Anne here constructs herself as a woman of rank and standing, accompanied by an entourage of 300 and being immersed in a “safe net” of powerful men and women. Moreover, she also paints a picture of female domesticity and intimacy: the diarist shares the bed with her cousin Frances Bourchier and Mary Carey. As historian Gabriele Jancke has shown, offering a guest to share the bed for the night was very common in the early modern era, since it was part of its culture of hospitality (2005: 5). Anne Clifford thus constructs herself as part of such a gendered network of hospitality, emphasising the affection that grows out of Frances and Mary’s generosity: “[It] was the beginning of the greatness between us”. The temporality of Clifford’s visits to Bath House—she visits them daily—is echoed both in the narrative construction of affection—she grows “more inward” with her relatives—and in the narrative form of the diary itself: she writes daily about her visits and relationships. Using an iterative, cumulative narrative pattern, Lady Anne stresses again and again that she has influential relations with whom she shares a ritual of hospitality and a great deal of mutual affection. Thus, she implies that she has the moral support of women of power and standing who love and support her. The material objects, the servants, whom she often refers to as “family” (see also Wilcox 2009: 151), echo, mirror, and demonstrate Anne Clifford’s entitlement to her patrimony. On a metaphorical level, Clifford’s frequent evocation of her entourage, certain material emblems of her wealth and status, and her Northern castles resonate with the way Winnicott describes the “transitional object”. They have a certain “permanence” (Winnicott 2005: 7) as they were erected by Anne’s ancestors, and they will survive the diarist and be inhabited by her descendants. The Northern castles have a long history, and they also connote futurity. The diarist organises their renovation as to make them habitable for future generations. Furthermore, the castles connote transitionality in the sense that they are endowed with a variety of meanings which vacillate between fantasy and reality. The castles are both actual material homes that are used and inhabited, but they are also imaginary places standing for Lady Anne’s ancestral line, which she hopes will be continued by her daughters and grandchildren. Clifford’s castles are thus both material and imaginary.

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In the chronicle of the year 1651, we find similar representation of places and material objects, which seem to have an intermediate quality between material reality and symbolic relevance. In the following extract, she relates the renovation of Appleby and Brougham castle, both of which appear to have been of particular importance to her: about the 18th and 19th February […] I returned back to Appleby Castle in Westmoreland (lying one night by the way at Kirkby Lonsdale) in which caste of mine I continued to lie for a year, without removing any whither and spent much in repairing of my castle of Appleby and Brougham, to make them as habitable as I could though Brougham was very ruinous and much out of repair. And in this year the 21st of April I helped to lay the foundation stone of the middle wall in the great tower of Appleby Castle in Westmoreland, called Caesar’s Tower to the end it may be repaired again and made habitable if it pleases God […] after it had stood without a roof or covering or one chamber habitable in it ever since about 1569, a little before the death of my grandfather of Cumberland, when the roof of it was pulled down in the great rebellion time [Aske’s rebellion, M.N.]. (2018: 122) […] And in this settled abode of mine in the three ancient houses of mine inheritance […] I do more and more fall in love with the contentments and innocent pleasures of a country life, which humour of mine I do wish all my heart (if it be the will of Almighty God) may be conferred on my posterity that are to succeed me in these places, for a wise body ought to make their own homes the place of self-fruition and the comfortablest part of their life. But this must be left to a succeeding Providence for none can know what shall come after them. Ecclesiastes 3.22. But to invite them to it, that saying in the 16th Psalm verses 5,6,7 and 8 may be fitly applied: ‘The lot is fallen unto me in a pleasant place, I have a fair heritage.’ […] All which benefits have been bestowed upon me for the heavenly goodness of my dear mother, whose fervent prayers were offered up with great zeal to Almighty God. (2018: 124)

The passages convey an overwhelming sense of history, but also of a new beginning. The castles are not habitable. Brougham, in particular, is presented as “very ruinous”. With a dynastic sense of pride, Lady Anne records having laid the foundation stone of the “Ceasar’s Tower”, a tower whose destruction dates from the same time as the death of her grandfather. In an epic sweep of temporal register, Anne records the coinciding “death” of the two pillars of patriarchal power, but she also documents that she rebuilds the places, creating a home for future generations. The

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diarist follows and maintains a male, patriarchal line, while also inaugurating a female line, creating a place for feminine domesticity and indulgence. Anne Clifford herself appears to inhabit an intermediate position in-­ between the patriarchal power of “Caesar’s Tower” and a feminine domesticity. Furthermore, she emphasises the strong bond between herself and her mother, whose “heavenly goodness”, “fervent prayers”, and “great zeal” aided her in her victory over “bitter and wicked enemies, and great oppositions of this world” (2018: 124). It is her mother Margaret who is associated with religious authority and passion, not her male ancestors. The sense of religious authority is further emphasised by Lady Anne’s numerous biblical references, which imply that her legitimacy as a female landowner is sanctioned by divine providence. Clifford’s writing is dynastic and religious, passionate (“zeal”, “fervent”) and calm (“contentment”). She stresses her legitimacy as a female landowner, but also softens that image by highlighting how she enjoys the “innocent pleasures of a country life”. Thus, Clifford’s writing is itself liminal and intermediate, drawing on a variety of different semantic fields and juxtaposing various possible subject positions. At the same time, however, it also constructs a sense of permanence, invoking the past (such as the destruction of the tower of Appleby Castle during Aske’s rebellion), the present, and the future of a “posterity” to come.

Languages of Feeling Lady Anne’s language is often strategic rather than expressive or “innocent”. For instance, she refers to Skipton Castle as a “house” (2018: 123) because of the ongoing military actions in 1651 and the threat they implied. Yet, there are instances, particularly in her earlier writings, in which the boundaries between strategic and self-articulatory functions of writing become blurred. Some evidence for affective uses of the diary can be found in the passages dated in the spring of 1616, when Anne’s husband Richard Sackville takes the infant Margaret into custody, using the child as a hostage to blackmail Anne into compliance. About the same time, Anne’s mother Margaret falls ill and eventually dies. It is a time of considerable crisis as the following extract demonstrates:

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[3 May 1616] Upon the 3rd came Baskett down from London and brought me a letter from my Lord by which I might see it was his pleasure that the Child should go the next day to London, which at first was somewhat grievous to me but when I considered that it would both make my Lord more angry with me and be worse for the Child, I resolved to let her go after I had sent for Mr. Legg and talked to him about that and other matters and wept bitterly. (2018: 32)

This entry is marked by a great sense of emotional turmoil, and thus differs considerably from most other entries in her diary (see also Seelig 2006: 46–7). Moreover, this passage is the first instance in which Anne Clifford documents that she acquiesces to the demands of her husband. She does not comply out of conviction but out of fear that her resistance might make things “worse for the Child”. In this entry, the diary is no longer a mirror which reflects back a potentially positive and reassuring image of the self, but a means to articulate painful emotions and to transform them into narrative. It does not seem to suffice to confide in “Mr Legg”, and there appears to be a need to write the grievous events down on paper. Writing seems to provide some sort of solace, or at least a form of “integration” as Winnicott would put it, in times of inner turmoil. This is particularly prominent in the passages from spring 1616. These entries create a sense that the diarist is a “vulnerable recipient of events and news reports” (Seelig 2006: 46) rather than the reassured voice of the female ruler. Many entries are summaries of letters she received and in which she is bombarded daily with alarming messages: her mother dies, her child is removed from her. These narrative representations of emotions are part of Anne’s strategy in the struggle for her rights, and thus may have been very carefully crafted to achieve a specific effect, that is, to convince her potential readers of the cruelty of her husband. In this vein, Barbara Kiefer Lewalski suggests that Foxe’s Book of Martyrs supplies a “paradigm for Anne Clifford’s self-portrait in her Diary” (1991: 96). Intriguingly, however, Anne Clifford hardly ever depicts herself as “a loving wife who patiently endures great suffering at the hand of her husband and much of society” (ibid.). Instead, her self-portrait is marked by emotional turmoil: [13 May 1616] Upon the 13th being Monday, my Lady’s Footman Thomas Petty brought me letters out of Westmoreland by which I perceived how very sick

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and full of grievous pains my dear Mother was so as she was not able to write herself to me, and most people feared she would hardly recover this sickness. At night I went out and prayed to God my only helper that she might not die in this pitiful case. (2018: 34)

Anne Clifford invokes God as the “only helper”. Furthermore, she locates her emotional life within an affective community, as she writes that “most people feared she would hardly recover this sickness” [sic]. It is, of course, possible that these entries are purely rhetorical. However, her rhetorics do not echo Foxe’s martyrology, as his martyrs remain perfectly serene in the face of cruelty, but a different kind of narrative representation of piety and subjectivity that I would associate with the pious diary. On 12 May 1616, she notes, “I stayed in the country having many times a sorrowful and heavy heart and being condemned by most folks because I would not consent to the agreements, so as I may truly say I am like an owl in the desert” (2018: 34). Rather than creating an image of heroism and martyrdom, she uses a language of pain, sorrow, and isolation. The biblical image of the “owl in the desert” (referring to Psalm 102: 6) does not actually connote bravery but quite simply despair. Unlike Foxe’s martyrs who endure their pain with equanimity, Clifford tacitly admits that she has a “heavy heart” and thus suffers from isolation, from the absence of her mother and her daughter and from being “condemned by most folks”. And yet, in this scene of despair and isolation, the diarist seems to construct a companion and a listener, a benign posterity, an object in the psychoanalytic sense. The diary as object serves the purpose of modulating and integrating emotions and coming to terms with “grievious” events. The passages dated in spring 1616 might well be strategic, but they also convey the sense that the diarist constructs a listener figure, an “imaginary addressee” (Lejeune 2009: 93). Like the “object” of psychoanalysis, the diary is neither identical with the self nor is it completely separate from it. As Rosalind Minsky summarises, Winnicott’s object relations theory “takes the view that the traditional division within psychoanalysis between inner and outer reality is inadequate as a description of human experience” and that “we need to include a third state of intermediate experience” (1996: 125). The concept of intermediacy is very instructive here, as Clifford’s narrative is, of course, not identical to the inner world of the actual historical persona Anne Clifford; however, it is not entirely contingent either. Concomitantly, the passage in which Clifford relates the death of her mother is marked by

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an intermediacy between illusion and disillusionment, as it appears to be conjuring up an object while being aware of its absence: [May 1616] Upon the 24th being Friday, between the hours of six and seven at night died my dear Mother at Brougham in the same chamber where my father was born, thirteen years and two months after the death of Queen Elizabeth and ten years and four months after the death of my father, I being then twenty-six and four months old, and the Child two years wanting a month. (2018: 36)

Clifford expresses her affective connection to her mother whom she calls “my dear Mother”. Moreover, she makes some very striking spatial and temporal connections, which convey a sense of intermediacy between fantasy and reality. Margaret dies in the “same chamber” in which her father was born, therefore being connected and united with him even after death. The juxtaposition of birth and death connotes the cycle of life and thus a way of coming to terms and making sense of an otherwise painful event. Anne Clifford makes a point of noting the exact time of her mother’s passing (between six and seven in the evening), her own age (“twenty-six and four months”) and that of her daughter Margaret (“two years wanting a month”). She seems to be looking for a meaningful numerical pattern, but she does not actually find one. Furthermore, here, as in the opening passage of the 1603 memoir, she positions herself, her mother, and her daughter in a close relationship with the late Queen Elizabeth I: Margaret dies “thirteen years and two months after the death of Queen Elizabeth”, and “ten years and four months after the death of my father”, who stands for a very different legacy. In this scene of loss, Anne Clifford establishes connections: with her father, with her mother, with places (the chamber in which her father was born), and with a dead queen. The passage reads like a chant or a litany, invoking a greater pattern and a deeper meaning. In this vein, it creates the illusion of magically conjuring up connections with lost objects, but ultimately also a sense of disillusionment: no matter how much she writes, the dead will never come back.

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“And Connect”: Patterns and Parallels The connective chant-like pattern sets the tone for Lady Anne’s later writings, particularly for the yearly chronicles or memoirs and the 1676 daybook. The yearly chronicles are punctuated by headings which announce the year in which the narrated events took place, and further structured along specific months, sometimes exact dates and even times of day, thus giving the text a sense of temporal responsibility. Another striking characteristic of Clifford’s later work is its conspicuous concern with place: Anne Clifford repeatedly mentions the castles she had stayed in and specifies in which chamber she had “lain”. Clifford’s depictions of place gain their power not from narrative elaboration—she usually mentions a place rather than describing it in great detail—but from repetition and connection: [1667] And the 18th October in this year after I had lain in Appleby Castle in Westmorland (in the chamber wherein I used to lie) ever since the eighth day of August last, being two months and some ten days over, did I remove from thence in my horselitter with my family (going along the usual high road, and not through Whinfell Park) into Brougham Castle in the same county, in which Castle of Brougham I had not been since the 1st day of August in 1665 till now and where I now continued to lie, as I used to do, in the chamber wherein my noble father was born and my blessed mother died, till the 26th day of June next following that I removed from thence back againe to Appleby Castle aforesaid, to lie there in it for a time. (2018: 188)

Here, as in almost every other entry in her yearly chronicles, Clifford marks each destination, the exact route she took, and the time span of her journey and visits in a sequence. What is more, she again draws connections between places and kin: she stays in the same room in which her mother had died and her father was born. She describes her parents with two striking adjectives: her father is “noble”—connoting his aristocratic lineage, her mother “blessed”, thus protected and sanctified by God. Anne Clifford presents herself as the heir of a religious and a secular power. The yearly chronicle mirrors her “noble” and “blessed” lineage. Intriguingly, Clifford’s musings on lineage and space continue when the Northern estates were “securely in her hands” (Matchinske 2009: 206). Why are Clifford’s later writings even more “place and time-obsessed” (ibid.: 210) than the earlier texts?

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I would suggest that there are two possible, interrelated answers. First, Clifford’s repetitive documentation of “land-based practices” (Elsky 2014: 512) could be read in connection with English common law. As Stephanie Elsky argues, Clifford had a substantial knowledge of English common law in which “custom” (ibid.), habit, and repetitive use of a property played a central part. Thus, Clifford may have hoped that “her own customs would one day become the force of law” (ibid.). This would also explain Lady Anne’s regular use of temporal deictic markers as in phrases such as “12th day of February this year” (2018: 188), markers that are typically associated with the diurnal rather than the memoir form. They underscore Clifford’s claims to veracity and legitimacy. The second possible answer is a bit more tentative. As Megan Matchinske suggests, Clifford’s claims to her legacy remained precarious and contested even when the lands were securely hers (2009: 206). Thus, her discursive status as a female property owner had to be vigilantly and recursively maintained (ibid.). At the same time, however, and here I would like to amend Matchinske’s and Elsky’s interpretations, Clifford’s later writings convey a sense of transitionality and elusiveness that cannot be sufficiently subsumed under the header of legal discourse. The yearly chronicles and the “Daybook” have a chant-like pattern, and they make connections between times, places, and figures that are both real and imaginary. Another entry may serve as an illustration: In the year of our Lord God 1667 The 10th day of January in this year (after I had lain in Skipton Castle in that chamber within the walls of it wherein I was borne into the world, ever since the 8th day of August last) did I remove from thence with my family, and so went through the Haw Park and by Shibden and Halton and those ways, I in my horselitter and some of my chief women in my coach, into my house or tower of Barden in Craven, where I had not been since the 6th day of May in 1663 till now and where I now continued to lie (in the same chamber I formerly used to lie in) till the 29th day of July following that I removed from hence with my family towards Pendragon and Appleby Castles in Westmoreland. And so this late Christmas did I lie all the time of it in my own chamber within the old walls of Skipton Castle, wherein I was born into the world, which was the first Christmas I ever kept in that chamber since I was born, though I had lain for several Christmases since I was last a widow (by the death of my Lord the Earle of Pembroke) in the other part of that castle which was built by my great-grandfather of Cumberland, in the middle chamber in the great round tower at the east end of the long gallery there. (2018: 185–6)

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The language of the passage merges the factual with the mystical. On the one hand, Clifford muses on the places she visited—her Northern estates— and the time she spent on the journey, thus conveying a sense of a factual verisimilitude and ownership. On the other, she also ponders where she spent Christmas in the past, evoking a slightly different, religiously infused temporal register. She notes that this Christmas is the first she spends in her “own chamber”, repeating twice that she sleeps in the chamber in which she was born. As an old lady, now 77 years old, she returns to the chamber in which she came to life; she connects with the place in which she was born, constructing a cyclical concept of time rather than a linear one. Read along feminist psychoanalytic lines, later texts fuse the “semiotic” with the “symbolic” mode of representation (Kristeva 1976); they are both concerned with the logic of the sign, and with a more primordial function of signification which hinges on the pre-symbolic phase in subject-­formation. For Kristeva, the symbolic is the language of science and logic, whereas the semiotic is the language of music, the visual arts, and the theatre. While the symbolic rests on binary oppositions and separation, the semiotic is concerned with links, parallelism, and rhythms. Kristeva defines the difference between symbolic and semiotic as follows: We shall call symbolic the logical and syntactic functioning of language and everything which, in translinguistic practices is assimilable to the system of language proper. The term semiotic, on the other hand, will be used to mean: in the first place, what can be hypothetically posited as preceding the imposition of language, in other words, the already given arrangement of the drives in the form of facilitations or pathways, and secondly the return of these facilitations in the forms of rhythms, intonations and lexical, syntactic and rhetorical transformations. If the symbolic established the limits and unity of a signifying practice, the semiotic registers in that practice the effect of that which cannot be pinned down as sign, whether signifier or signified. (1976: 68)

Anne Clifford’s later work resonates with “rhythms” and “intonations”; it uses repetitions and sweeping temporal registers, but it is also a “signifying practice”, a way of establishing legal personhood. In the last decade of her life, Lady Anne writes about her life in a form that resembles a litany as well as a list. At times, her yearly chronicles resonate with the tone of a religious chant and, at others, convey the dryness of a legal document.

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The text has a rhythmic pattern, resting on syntactic parallelisms and anaphora. Its defining formal element is the repetitive use of the conjunction “And” with which Clifford literally connects the sentences, and thus the events she relates in them. At the same time, however, her narrative still works as “sign”. It is coherent and perfectly legible. It resonates with legal discourses, and its instrumentality in Clifford’s struggle for her patrimony is perfectly obvious. The passage invokes the symbolic in terms of the powerful presence of paternal figures—her late husband Pembroke, her great-grandfather. Anne Clifford positions herself in a spatial and a genealogical connection to her great-grandfather: she stays in the part of the castle which was erected by him. In terms of language and temporality, however, the diarist narrates in sweeping temporal spans, connecting the far past with the present and secular time with times of religious festivity, thus connoting a less tangible, more “semiotic” (in Kristeva’s sense) register. In the last months of her life, which are conveyed in her 1676 “Daybook”, the cyclicality, the repetitiveness, and the “connectivity” of her language becomes even more pronounced. Almost every entry in the “Daybook” resume with the phrase “I went not out of the house nor out of my chamber today” (2018: 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 233, 235, 236) or “all this day” (2018: 237, 238). The epiphoric repetition emphasises the isolation of an old lady who probably was too weak to travel. At the same time, however, it also illustrates Anne Clifford’s ongoing concern with place (“chamber”, “house”) and time (“today”, “all day”). On the level of language, the epiphora creates a slow rhythm and patterning. Anne Clifford relies both on the power of the patriarchal symbolic, positioning herself as landowner, agent, and voice, and on the resonance of the semiotic, fusing her language with epiphora, syntactic parallelisms, and rhythm. Moreover, the 1976 “Daybook” is concerned with recreating past memories and forging connections and parallels between different temporal levels. I will quote again from a passage I mentioned earlier in this chapter, the entry in which Lady Anne remembers how her daughter fell “desperately sick”: [January 1676] The 12th day, I remembered how this day was fifty-nine years […] my first and then only child the Lady Margaret, after she had been in the garden at Knowle House in Kent, did in the night fall desperately sick of her long

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ague of which she was in great danger of death, she then lying in a chamber in the tower there, which was underneath my chamber. (2018: 244)

Clifford establishes not just temporal but also spatial links and repetitions: it is the same day her daughter Margaret fell ill, and her daughter would stay in a room underneath Anne’s own chamber. The name of her daughter echoes the name of her mother, and the affection the diarist has for her daughter echoes the affection her own mother had for her. Anne Clifford’s narrative becomes more and more “semiotic” in Kristeva’s sense, not just because she is explicitly concerned with mother-daughter relationships but because the chain of signification rests on parallels and connections rather than on oppositions and separations (as in symbolic language). Also, her sense of time becomes less linear and more cyclical: it is the same day as 59 years before, and she is therefore less concerned with the immediate present or recent past, but more concerned with times long gone. This pattern occurs several times in the daybook. As Lady Anne emphasises again and again, the temporal parallels and connections between time past and the present, she also uses the same verbal constructions repetitively. These repetitions create a sense of pattern and permanence that counterpoints the fleeting nature of memory and time. On yet another level, specific dates also might trigger specific memories. In the following entry dated 21 January 1676, she relates how much she feared for her daughter on 21 January 1617: I remembered how this day was fifty-nine years […] I went out of Great Dorset House in London town from my first Lord down to my first child the Lady Margaret to lie there in Knowle House in Kent for a good while. I thanked God I found her alive though extremely weak and ill. (ibid. 235)

The entry strongly is structured like the entry Lady Anne composed only ten days earlier, and it also has the same content. It recreates a memory from her life as a young mother, but also echoes her other, more recent narrative recreations of the past. Parallels and repetitions abound in the 1676 daybook, and they stress how meaningful the process of writing her life must have been for Lady Anne. Earlier in the same week, she also muses on her struggle to regain her patrimony, in particular, her confrontation with King James and the support of Queen Anne. Here, as in the previously quoted passages, she not

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only records her memories along factual lines but also discovers connections and parallels. Moreover, her writing is now more intensely coloured by religious overtones than they were in her earlier texts. [January 1676] The 20th day, I remembered how this day was fifty-nine years [1617] I went with my first Lord to the Court at Whitehall, where in the inner withdrawing chamber King James desired and urged me to submit to the award which he would make concerning my Lands of Inheritance, but I absolutely denied to do so, wherein I was guided by a great Providence of God for the good of me and mine. And that day also had my first and then only child a dangerous fit of her long ague in Knowle House in Kent, where she then lay. (ibid.: 235)

As in the other entries dating from January 1676, Anne Clifford does not relate the events of that particular week; instead, she looks back on her youth. However, these are not the nostalgic musings of an old lady, as the entries are specific and clear. Clifford remembers exactly the day of her meeting with the late King as well as the chamber at Whitehall into which she was led. She records that this was the same week in which her daughter fell ill, and thus establishes a temporal connection between these two events, both of which were moments of crisis. With hindsight, she constructs herself as having being protected by the “great Providence of God”. Here, as in the other passages, she merges what Kristeva calls “symbolic” language—a focus on dates and facts—and the semiotic—divine intervention. The two aspects are not at odds with one another but appear to be interlinked: for Clifford, aside from the historical and legal exactitude, there also appears to be something auspicious in getting all the facts right. Being “temporally responsible and spatially attentive” (Matchinske 2009: 203) seems to be a source of strength for the diarist. It provides safety like a protective prayer. Here, as in earlier passages in her diaries, Anne Clifford employs a dual strategy to vindicate herself as female landowner and as narrative voice: She combines factual symbolic and more mythical semiotic language. She sees herself in the dynastic line of powerful men and women and as instituting a line of powerful women to come. To a certain extent, she is a protofeminist activist, but she is also a “subordinate subject” (Suzuki 2003) who constantly, repetitively must defend her contested position.

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Coda Anne Clifford’s writings are suggestive of two discourses that exist side by side: they make feminist claims to legal personhood, ownership, and power, but also to the anxiousness that comes with such claims. Clifford’s writings mirror her position of social standing and rank; they insert her into a position of speech and agency, which was coded as male and hence precarious for her. At the same time, she invokes her female lineage, a linage she pictures both as politically empowering and as psychologically reassuring and nurturing. For Lady Anne, domestic matters are also dynastic. As such, her mother is both a nurturing presence and a powerful strategist and her greatest support. Thus, Lady Anne’s writings are not simply a matter of a woman claiming a male subject position. Rather, the texts invoke both gender roles and several linguistic codes at the same time. Lady Anne positions herself as a speaking and writing subject, but also as protected by an intimate relationality with female rulers. Furthermore, Lady Anne’s diaries are alive with references to material objects and places. These objects are both actual material homes she visits and enjoys but also more imaginary places symbolising her ancestral line and her social rank. Like Winnicott’s transitional object, Lady Anne’s estates are both “intermediate”—they are part of herself and yet separate from her—and “permanent”—they convey a sense of history and continuity. On the level of form, the serial, cumulative narrative structure of Clifford’s later work is of great importance. Her 1676 “daybook” fuses what Kristeva calls symbolic and semiotic language, that is, the language of reason and power and the language of rhythms and intonations. The two texts invoke cyclical, mystical, temporal registers as well as historical facts; they merge a spiritually infused language with profane spatial and temporal markers. Clifford is concerned with drawing spatial and temporal connections, with establishing commonalities and overlaps between different generations, rather than constructing binary oppositions and separations. In this manner, Clifford inserts herself into both a male (symbolic, individual) and a female (semiotic, relational) subject positions. Unlike Margaret Hoby several decades earlier, Clifford grapples with the differing roles and expectations for women and men and vindicates her claims to female land-ownership, an oxymoron for most of her contemporaries. While Hoby uses the diurnal form to construct herself as a pious, obedient

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subject, Clifford uses sequential narrative to claim agency, power and voice, a position that hinges on a sense of being connected with and protected by other powerful female rulers. It is thus difficult to make generalising claims about the ideology of the diurnal form and its relation to gender. Women use the diurnal form for very different purposes. To see the diary as a “gendered genre” that is particularly attuned to the “fragmented” quality of women’s domestic life appears to be anachronistic with respect to early modern women diarists whose narratives are not considerably concerned with domesticity, nor are they, strictly speaking, fragmented. They cohere by dint of repetition and accumulation. They create a small path on which early modern women could tread towards agency and voice.

References Acheson, Katherine (1995) “Lady Anne Clifford.” British Prose Writers of the Early Seventeenth Century. Ed. Clayton D. Lein. Detroit, MI: Gale. 77–81. Bedford, Ronald, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly (2007) Early Modern English Lives: Autobiography and Self-Representation 1500–1660. Aldershot: Ashgate. Cixous, Hélèn (1980) “The Laugh of the Medusa [1975].” New French Feminism. Ed. E. Marks and I. De Courtivron. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. 245–64. ———. (1986) Newly Born Woman. Transl. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Clifford, Anne (2018) Anne Clifford’s Autobiographical Writing, 1590–1676. Ed. Jessica Malay. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Clifford, D.J.H. (2003) “Introduction and Acknowledgements.” The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford. Stroud: Sutton Publishers. viii–xiv. Chodorow, Nancy (1978) The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Elsky, Stephanie (2014) “Lady Anne Clifford’s Common-Law Mind.” Studies in Philology 111:3. 521–546. Erikson, Amy Louise (1993) Women and Property in Early Modern England. London: Routledge. Friedman, Alice T. (2009) “Constructing an Identity in Prose, Plaster and Paint: Lady Anne Clifford as Writer and Patron of the Arts.” Anne Clifford and Lucy Hutchinson. Ed. Mihoko Suzuki. Surrey: Ashgate. 103–20. Honig, Bonnie (2013) “The Politics of Public Things: Neoliberalism and the Routine of Privatization.” Thinking Out Loud. Sydney: Fordham University Press. 59–76. http://www.helsinki.fi/nofo/NoFo10HONIG.pdf accessed on 06 Jan 2021.

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Hull, Suzanne W. (1982) Chaste, Silent and Obedient. San Marino: Huntington. Irigaray, Luce (1985) Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. (1980) “When Our Lips Speak Together.” Signs 6:1. 69–79. ———. (1993) Sexes and Genealogies. Trans. Gillian Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jancke, Gabriele (2005) “Bettgeschichten: Gastfreundschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit.” Querelles 17. http://www.querelles-net.de/index.php/qn/article/ view/390/398 (accessed on 6 Jan 2021). Klein, Lisa M. (2001) “Lady Anne Clifford as Mother and Matriarch: Domestic and Dynastic Issues in Her Life and Writings.” Journal of Family History 26: 18–38. Kristeva, Julia (1976) “Signifying Practice and Mode of Production.” Edinburgh Review 1. Lacan, Jacques (2001/1977) Ecrits: A Selection. Ed. and trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Routledge Classics. Lamb, Mary Ellen (2009/1992) “The Agency of the Split Subject: Lady Anne Clifford and the Uses of Reading.” Anne Clifford and Lucy Hutchinson. Ed. Mihoko Suzuki. Surrey: Ashgate. 43–65. ———. (1998) “Tracing a Heterosexual Erotics of Service in Twelfth Night and the Autobiographical Writings of Thomas Whythorne and Anne Clifford.” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 40.1: 1–25. Lejeune, Philippe (2009) On Diary. Ed. Jeremy E. Pomkin and Julie Rak. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. Lewalski, Barbara K. (1991) “Re-Writing Patriarchy and Patronage: Margaret Clifford, Anne Clifford, and Aemilia Lanyer.” Yearbook of English Studies 21: 87–106. Miller, Nancy K. (2007) “The Entangled Self. Genre Bondage in the Age of Memoir.” PMLA 2:122. 537–548. Minsky, Rosalind (1996) Psychoanalysis and Gender. New  York/London: Routledge. Nevitt, Marcus (2006) Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 1640–1660. Aldershot: Ashgate. Malay, Jessica (2018) “Introduction.” Anne Clifford’s Autobiographical Writing, 1590–1676. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 1–14. Matchinske, Megan (2009) “Serial Identity: History, Gender and Form in the Diary Writing of Lady Anne Clifford.” Anne Clifford and Lucy Hutchinson. Ed. Mihoko Suzuki. Surrey: Ashgate. 203–18. Moulsworth, Martha (1993) My Name was Martha. West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press. Pirnie, Karen Worley (1996) “Moulsworth, Freud, Lacan.” Critical Matrix 10:1 n. pag. Online resource.

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Rose, Mary Beth (1986) “Gender, Genre, and History: Seventeenth-Century English Women and the Art of Autobiography.” Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. 245–278. Seelig, Sharon Cadman (2006) Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women’s Lives, 1600–1680. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stone, Lawrence (1977) The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800. New York: Harper and Row. Suzuki, Mihoko (2003) Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary Form in England, 1588–1688. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. (2009) “Introduction.” in: Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers. Farnham: Ashgate. Xii–xxiv. Tancke, Ulrike (2010) “Bethinke Thy Selfe” Early Modern England: Writing Women’s Identities. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Winnicott, Donald (2005) Playing and Reality [1978]. Routledge Classics. London/New York: Routledge. Wilcox, Helen (2009) “Anne Clifford and Samuel Pepys: Diaries and Homes.” Home Cultures 6.2: 149–161.

CHAPTER 6

“My Own Hearte out of Frame”: Emotions, Relations, and Religion in Ralph Josselin’s Diary

The diary of the country clergyman Ralph Josselin (1616–1683) is well known among historians, but there is little cultural or literary criticism focussing on his extensive diary, which he kept between 1641 and 1683. Like Margaret Hoby, Josselin was a “Puritan” (MacFarlane 1978: 21), and his diary is permeated by a language of piety. At the same time, however, Josselin’s text also resonates strongly with the reader of the twenty-first century, and it thus appears to be less alien than that of Hoby. As Alan MacFarlane, the editor of Josselin’s diary, points out: My training led me to expect that, living before the watershed of the industrial revolution, his [Josselin’s] social and mental and economic life would appear very remote, very different from my own. […] I was startled to find, on the contrary, how ‘modern’ his world was; his family life, his attitudes to children, economic anxieties, and the very structure of thought was very familiar indeed. (1978: 3)

Indeed, Josselin’s diary has a strikingly “familiar” quality. The topics he addresses are varied—family, the state of the country, the harvest, the weather, his health—and his language is often emotive, sometimes moving, particularly in the passages in which he writes about his kin and in the entries that deal with his faith. Emotions such as joy, gratitude, anxiety, and grief are Josselin’s constant companions.

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It is thus easy to see how MacFarlane could draw his conclusions with respect to Josselin’s alleged modern, individualist mentalité. However, MacFarlane’s reading stands in stark contrast with more recent interpretations of Josselin’s journal (Bedford et  al. 2007: 31–38). According to Bedford, Davis, and Kelly, Josselin depicts himself as a “victim” rather than an “agent” in the modern sense (ibid.: 33). For these critics, Josselin is not a “rampant individualist” (MacFarlane 1978: 63) but rather the opposite—a passive, receptive, anxious subject who “stand and wait[s]”— as Milton’s sonnet goes—for God’s divine grace. The present chapter takes up these two contrasting analyses and explores the various ways in which Josselin’s diary vacillates between being familiar and alien. The chapter falls into three sections. After a brief biographical sketch and information on the editorial history and materiality of the diary, it analyses the way Josselin represents his relationship with God. As MacFarlane concedes, God appears as an “immediate and personal force” (1970: 179) in Josselin’s diary, as an almighty “father figure” (ibid.: 176) whose ways are inscrutable but whose commands still need to be followed. Josselin’s relationship with God is marked by a most austere sense of passivity—it is God who bestows good faith and intensity of purpose on Josselin, and it is God who sends good weather and rich harvests, or bad weather and, thus, the destruction of the harvest. God gives Josselin good health or minor ailments. The only thing Josselin can actively perform is to discern God’s will through interpreting these events. Here, the diary serves the important purpose of observing and documenting God’s dealings in the world but also of monitoring the strength of the diarist’s own faith. The final section examines how Josselin writes about his familial relationships with his family. I suggest that Josselin’s sense of self is inseparable from these relationships and thus interpersonal rather than individualist or autonomous. To illustrate this point, I focus on the passages in which Josselin writes about loss and death, passages that are marked by their use of emotive language. It is Josselin’s habit of pouring his heart into his diary that makes it so resonant for the contemporary reader.

A Biographical Sketch Ralph Josselin was born in Roxwell, Essex, on 26 January 1616 as the third child (but first and only son) of John and Anne Josselin (MacFarlane 1970: 15). His paternal grandfather had been a rich yeoman, but only very

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little of his patrimony actually reached the diarist, since his father John had lost a large portion of it due to unsuccessful farming (ibid.: 15). John Josselin nevertheless managed to provide his son with a sound education, and Ralph developed an early interest in books and cosmography (ibid.: 15–16). Josselin ascribes his vocation to become a minister and his passionate interest in the Bible to God, but he also had a role-model in his uncle Nathaniel (John Josselin’s brother) who was minister in Norfolk (cf. ibid.: FN 1). It is unclear where Josselin got his millenarian leanings, but there is plenty of evidence in the diary that Josselin preferred this variant of nonconformist Protestantism over others. Many of his entries—particularly between 1647 and 1657—ponder the possible Second Coming of Christ including a variety of calculations and arithmetics drawn from biblical apocalyptic texts and from secular history (Bedford et al. 2007: 34). Ralph Josselin earned his B.A. from Jesus College in 1636–1637 and spent the next three years looking for an appropriate post (ibid.: 17). After having received various offers from parishes, he accepted an offer by Richard Harlakenden, proprietor of the Earl’s Colne Priory. He moved to Earl’s Colne in March 1641. Ralph Josselin was quite successful economically and accumulated considerable wealth (ibid.: xxv, see also MacFarlane 1970: 58). Like his contemporary Samuel Pepys, Josselin meticulously noted his earnings and expenses in his diary and appears to have been very “careful and accurate” (ibid.: 33). However, for Josselin, financial success was not an end in itself but a way to discern God’s providence. Josselin met his future wife Jane Constable in church (ibid.: 17), and the couple got married on 28 October 1640 (ibid.: 81). Many entries in Josselin’s diary suggest that the marriage was happy, built on mutual respect and affection. Josselin may even have been present at Jane’s many deliveries. He certainly writes very empathetically about Jane’s morning sickness during pregnancy and the “many sad pains, and sadder feares” (Josselin 1976: 502) of her labour, as on 26 November 1663. The Josselins had ten live births between 1642 and 1663. Five of the children predeceased their parents, but only their first son Ralph died a few days after his birth in 1648 (ibid.: 113). Josselin’s descriptions of the (at times fatal) sicknesses of his children are the most moving and the most striking entries in the diary. Josselin’s children all left their parents’ household during their adolescence (MacFarlane 1970: 92). The boys were sent to other households as bound apprentices and the daughters worked as servants in richer households, where they also received a modicum of education. None of the

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names of their respective masters suggest kinship with the Josselins (ibid.: 93). The daughters got married in their late teens or early 20s (ibid.: 94). From what we can tell from the diary, all of them kept close ties with their parents. During the Civil War, Josselin fought with the Parliamentarian Army. In the 1640s, there are month-to-month reports of parliamentary victories and setbacks. In January 1645, he also records his resentment against the Archbishop Laud, that “grand enemy of the power of godlynes [and] great stickler for all outward pompe in the service of God” (ibid.: 31). However, Josselin strongly disapproved of the King’s execution, noting in 1648 that “my teares were not restrained at the passages about his death” (ibid.: 155). His nonconformism meant that he lived in a state of protracted insecurity during the Restoration. In the year 1662, Josselin repeatedly refers to other dissenters who were put on trial. Even though he was included on a list of nonconformists himself, his own case was never actually legally pursued by the authorities (MacFarlane 1970: 28; Bedford et al. 2007: 34). According to Alan MacFarlane, it is a “puzzle” among historians that Josselin was spared from legal punishment (1970: 29). The diarist himself seems to have been similarly surprised and relieved at the fact: as he writes when counting his blessing of the year 1663 in late March 1664, “my publique libertie strangely continued unto mee” (Josselin 1976: 507). In the last years of his life, Josselin started to break up his estate among his children (ibid.: 98). From the 1670s onwards, he gradually retired but still appears to have performed physical labour (ibid.: 106). The entries of his diary gradually become briefer and his handwriting more shapeless. He died at the age of 67, in the year 1683, and on a Sunday as he had wished he would (ibid.: 657). The original manuscript of Josselin’s diary consists of 182 pages measuring 14.7 by 20 cm (i.e. 5 by 8 inches) of close, often abbreviated handwriting on both sides of the paper (MacFarlane 1976: xix; Bedford et al. 2007: 31). It was bound in leather, perhaps by Josselin’s descendants; the binding is adorned with a coat of arms and the initials “G” and “K” on the two respective sides (MacFarlane 1976: xix). The manuscript may have gone to his youngest daughter Rebekah, married to Steward Spicer, since there is a note in it which says “Mr. Spicer his book” (ibid.: xix). How it passed into the hands of the Lord Manor is unknown, but there is evidence that it was in Colne Priory from 1765 onwards (ibid.: xix). In the

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nineteenth century, it was purchased from a London bookstall by the novelist Margaret Oliphant, having either been lent or stolen from the Priory in 1850. A first edition of about one-third of the diary’s text appeared in 1908 and is still available in print. It contains about 130,000 of the 290,000 words of the original manuscript. Alan MacFarlane’s 1976 edition comprises the whole manuscript.

A “Rampant Individualist”? Josselin’s diary opens with a title that sets the tone for the ensuing text: “A thankfull observacion of divine providence and goodness towards mee and a summary view of my life: by mee Ralph Josselin” (1976: 1). The title frames the diary in a pious context and resonates with other pious autobiographical genres of the time, such as the spiritual autobiography or the conversion narrative. The first paragraphs of the diary were mostly composed retrospectively, and, like the colonial-settler autobiographers some decades later, describe narrowly escaping dangers such as “fire”, “falls from a horse”, and even a knife attack by his sister, “a wild child but now I hope god hath tamed […] her spi[rit]” (ibid.). Such narrow escapes were interpreted as auspicious signs of pre-election and therefore particularly important to record. Only a few pages later, however, the text breaks with the retrospective pattern and uses a diurnal structure. The stretch of time on which the diarist looks back becomes increasingly shorter in the 1630s, and from 1643 onwards, Josselin dates his entries and recounts the incidents of a specific week or even only the events of one day. Josselin does not explain why he changed the narrative form. As a well-read minister, he may have been familiar with manuals on diary-keeping. John Beadle, one of the most popular authors on the art of pious journal-keeping, was a minister at Barnston, only 15 kilometres away from Josselin’s parish (MacFarlane 1970: 7 FN 2). Many entries in the diary demonstrate that Josselin was inspired by the Reformist doctrine of redeeming time: [30 October 1648] In the latter end of October I begun to reade: Bell: de 15: staires our ladder steps to god, a prettie discourse, it containes 418: pages in 16°. I also read in mornings, Feri Specimen, a learned discourse, it containeth: p. 559:

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I observed the most materiall things in him, Lord I have lost much of my time, oh enable mee to redeeme it; give mee oh god not only industriousnes, but to studdy out of love to the[e]. (1976: 143–144)

Josselin here lists his daily activities, meticulously noting the titles of the tracts he read and the exact page numbers. Furthermore, he records feeling a pang of guilt about having “lost much of [his] time”. Here, as in many other passages, Josselin uses a language with strong emotional overtones and exclamatory forms. He fears that his motivations for studying have been selfish rather than guided by the love of God. His “sin”, therefore, is not only a matter of outward performance but also a matter of an inward state of mind. Josselin’s concern with affective inwardness is striking and—to use MacFarlane’s words—may strike the reader as “modern”. I would, however, insist on the difference between the interiority of the Reformation subject and a system of individualism, which MacFarlane defines as follows: [I]t is the view that society is constituted by autonomous, equal units, namely separate individuals, and thus such individuals are more important, ultimately than the larger constituent group. It is reflected in the concept of individual private property, in the political and legal liberty of the individual, in the idea of the individual’s direct communication with God. (MacFarlane 1978: 5)

Josselin’s relationship with God is “private”, but he does not construct himself as being “autonomous”. Instead, the diarist pictures himself as a passive recipient of God’s grace or wrath: God protects Josselin from sinful emotions (though not always) and gives him peace of mind. He sends good or bad weather, stomach aches, coughs, and colds, as well as the recoveries from these ailments. The following passages, in which Josselin relates several small diseases, may illustrate this point: [13 April 1645] This weeke god was pleased to exercise mee with a cold my wife with faintnes, some dayes wondrous hott, but oh how sweet was his mercy our chastisements being very gentle, god good to us in our peace and plenty […] Lord learne me more knowledge of thy wayes, and prowesse of spirit to honour thee in the practice of them for the Lord Jesus Christs sake. (1976: 38)

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[4 January 1646] This weeke the Lord was gratious to mee and mine in our healths. peace provision, all well with us and our litle ones, yett the times sickly and many dyed suddenly, in his name bee praised in our preservacion. the Lord was good to mee in the fast day, and on his owne day, he purge my thoughts and keepe my heart more close every day to himselfe. (ibid.: 52) [13 February 1648] 2 Houres before day I was taken very ill, a litle chilling cold, and with a pronesse to vomiting; some neighbours came in, I was very sicke for the time, I vomited thrice, phlegme, and Choler […] and then I lay in sweatt until 3 of the clocke, which sweate spent and wasted the humour. I blesse the lord for a spirit of patience and submission he was pleased to give mee. (ibid.: 111)

Like many other passages of Josselin’s diary, the entries are marked by a constant, almost “obsessional”, concern with health (MacFarlane 1970: 170). Part of this is due to the precariousness of the early modern world. Josselin probably lived in a “damp house” (ibid.: 170), which led to infections of all kinds; medicine was poorly developed, and the population was also constantly decimated by wars. For an early modern yeoman like Josselin, “nothing was secure” (ibid.: 171). At a time of high mortality, small “afflictions” could turn out to be lethal, as could “great raines” (Josselin 1976: 130), which the diarist notes in August 1648. But apart from highlighting the precarious character of Josselin’s material living conditions, the entries also have strong religious overtones. Josselin frames the incidents he writes about in terms of his faith, as providential signs. Thus, Josselin recalls gratefully that God was “gratious to mee and mine in our healths” (ibid.: 52) in January 1646. The Josselins are spared from death, although the “times [are] sickly and many dyed” (ibid.). The knowledge of having narrowly escaped from great harm is not just gratifying in itself, but more importantly, for Josselin, it is an unmistakable message from God, saying that He watches over him and counts him (and his family) among the happy elect. The way Josselin writes about his body, his faith, and his emotions does not tell a story of autonomy, but gives evidence of a different, pre-­ individualist frame of mind. Josselin notes that God chastises him in sending ill health to his family. Thus, the body is not pictured along modern, individualist lines, as matter or “res extensa”, but as porous, as being directly in touch with God. Josselin goes on to profess that he is eager to

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learn more about God’s ways through what he views as God’s “chastisement”. The body thus becomes a vessel through which Josselin can receive messages from God. This communication involves not only Josselin as an individual but also his whole family, which Josselin constructs as a fluid macro-subject. The borders between the various family members are there (he does mention them as separate persons), but they do not seem to be significant. The Josselin family is one under God’s divine gaze. I do not see any evidence that Josselin portrays himself as being “more important […] than the larger constituent group” (MacFarlane 1978: 5). Moreover, Josselin is not very much concerned with private property since even his very body does not belong to him; it is lent to him by his Maker. Furthermore, Josselin implores God to “purge” his “thoughts” and to “keepe” his “heart more close […] to himselfe” (ibid.: 52). He praises the Lord for giving him a “spirit of patience and submission” (ibid.: 111). As a result, even his acceptance of God’s will is not something that he can actively perform but something that God grants or withholds from him. The only thing Josselin can do as an agent in the modern sense is to pray to God to lend him His Grace. Apart from that, Josselin portrays himself as deeply, fundamentally passive. His thoughts, attitudes, his physical functions, his whole body and mind—the self as we would call it today— are depicted as being mere vessels for God’s dealings. Consequently, these passages do not translate very well into the idiom of individualism but resonate more conspicuously with holistic, pious, community-oriented models of the self. The whole point of Josselin keeping a journal is not so much to highlight the individual self of Josselin, vicar of Earls Colne, but to emphasise God’s divine providence. Why, then, does Josselin’s diary resonate centuries later (and I do agree that it does)? I think the main reason is that Josselin uses his diary as a medium for articulating and constructing feeling. His language is replete with emotional expressions, such as on 13 April 1645 when he notes, “oh how sweet was his mercy our chastisements being very gentle” (ibid.: 38), conveying a sense of immense gratitude, relief, and happiness. He emphasises repeatedly that “god [was] good to us in our peace and plenty […]” and continues, almost like an overeager schoolboy, “Lord learne me more knowledge of thy wayes the reason” (ibid.). Even though it is difficult for me to relate to Josselin’s piety, I can nevertheless easily comprehend the emotions he expresses here. This is the reason why Josselin’s diary conveys a high degree of “experientiality” (Fludernik 1996: 12). It provides

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cognitive and affective clues that create the illusion of being transported into the narrative world of the diarist (c.f. ibid.). Arguably, Josselin’s striking emotive language also quite simply echoes his professional vocation as a minister. The exclamatory phrase, “oh how sweet was his mercy”, may well have occurred again in the many sermons Josselin gave. Crucially, however, Josselin’s affectivity is not just a matter of public, professional performance or stylised rhetorics but also one of inner substance. Josselin’s gratitude, his relief, and his happiness highlight his close relationship to God, and they appear to be perfectly frank.

The Pious Subject and Its Affections In Josselin’s diary, God appears as an almighty, inscrutable power; however, Josselin hardly ever doubts His goodness. On the contrary, God is praised for every abatement of suffering, however small (see also MacFarlane 1970: 173–175). When, in late August 1648, a “great floud” destroys all the hay and the corn harvested in the season, which Josselin notes with a hint of despair, the diarist hastens to add that God also brought a victory to the Parliamentary army in the north (1976: 131). He appears to embrace the Calvinist doctrine, according to which disasters— such as the destruction of a harvest—should be endured with equanimity. In many instances, Josselin invokes a spirit of acceptance in times of psychic strain, as, for instance, during the Civil War when the King’s army invades Earls Colne, and the diarist, as well as other members of the parish, are “plundered […] of all that was portable”: [12 June 1647] on Monday morning the enemy came to Colne, were resisted by our townes men. no part of Essex gave them so much opposicion as wee did. they plundered us, and mee in particular, of all that was portable except, brasse, pewter, and bedding. I made away to Coggeshall, and avoyded their scouts through providence, I praise god for this experiment, it is not so much to part with any thing as wee suppose, god can give us a contented heart in any condicion, and when our losses may serve to advance gods glory, wee ought to rejoyce in the spoiling of our goods. (1976: 128)

Here, Josselin recounts a disturbing, violent incident while remaining largely silent about the emotional strain it may have caused him. He does, however, tell us a great deal about the ideological lens through which he

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views these events. According to Josselin, his escape from danger is a providential sign—he may have been plundered but at least he survived. Furthermore, Josselin explains that it is his religious duty to bear the yoke that God has given him, as “god can give us a contended heart in any condicion”. Suffering hardship is endowed with spiritual value, as it “serve[s] to advance gods glory”. The entry resonates with other pious genres, such as the sermon or the prayer, particularly towards the end of the passages, which concludes with the phrase “wee ought to rejoice in the spoiling of our goods”. On another level, the passage conveys the sense that the diarist attempts to ‘write himself’ into an acquiescent, accepting state of mind. Josselin’s writing practice would then be a practice of self-dressage. The writing subject here appears to be split into two components or aspects: one obedient and pious that seeks advantage over another sceptical or even reluctant aspect. Viewed through a psychoanalytic lens, here, the diary is a Freudian “super-­ ego” that attempts to regulate the subject’s disruptive impulses. With the help of his diary, Josselin attempts to tame or outwit his initial emotional response—grief over the loss of his good, maybe also anger—and comply with the religious norm to “kiss the rod”, to accept God’s will and be grateful for having escaped graver harm. On the following day, Josselin relates the experiences of the siege. It is towards the end of the long entry that Josselin hints at his despair: [13 June 1648] I went divers times to the leaguard, but through gods providence, I mett with no danger, yett the musketts divers times, and the Drake bullett flew with divers noises neare mee, my dayes are in gods hands, but I have not returned unto god according unto his great goodnesse, but have found my owne heart more out of frame, and more subject to temptacion and evill in this time than at other times: the lord in his mercy pardon mee and accept me and sanctifie me. (ibid.: 129)

The passage starts with a proto-typical expression of gratitude about having escaped mortal danger through “providence”. However, the language of the passages is marked by the repetitive use of “yett” and “but”, suggesting that the diarist tries to provide different and contradicting pieces of information at the same time. Josselin confesses that he cannot fulfil his religious obligations, noting that he is “subject to temptacion and evill”, which seems to scare him tremendously, as his “heart [is] out of frame”.

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His spiritual anxiety leads him to confess and to pray ever more earnestly, to appeal to God’s “mercy” and beg for “pardon”. The passage resonates with notions of subjectivity that are at odds with the idiom of individualism. For Josselin, “evill” is not something that he actively chooses, rather it is an emotion that befalls him—his “heart [is] out of frame”. Feelings are part of his “owne heart”, but he does not seem to think that he has control over them. Satisfaction, gratitude, and inner calm are emotional states that God can grant or withhold from him. The tragedy of Josselin is that there is next to nothing he can do to free himself from sinful emotions, and yet God will hold him accountable for them. Josselin constructs his inner life as being torn between two internal forces: a force that Freud would term “the super-ego”, which requires him to comply with the religious norms, and the “id”—“subject to temptacion and evill”—which acts and reacts instinctively and cannot be regulated and controlled. In this vein, Josselin does not picture himself as an individual agent but as a subject that is torn between conflicting demands. To use Freud’s allegory, Josselin is like a rider of two horses. By reading Josselin’s diary along psychoanalytic lines, I do not wish to “diagnose” Josselin as a “neurotic”. Rather, I am trying to account for both the resonance which “afflicts me” while reading Josselin’s diary and the historical alterity of the text. The issue is commensurate with a long debate concerning the “inwardness” (Maus 1995) of the early modern subject. As I suggested in Chap. 3, early modern inwardness emerges through the friction between religious ideology and human imperfection, as a tension between “divine and human observation” (Maus 1995: 11). If pious subjects such as Josselin were able to replicate God’s gaze perfectly, if there was no friction or gap between God’s perfection and the pious self, then indeed inwardness would vanish (ibid.). In Josselin’s case, the gap between divine providence and human life is constant. He is “subject to temptacion and evill” and yet securely in God’s hands. He needs God’s help to remain firm in his belief. Even in laconic remarks such as “God good in outward mercies, yet my family crasie” with which he opens his entry on 16 October 1664 (1976: 512), he constructs a gap between divine perfection and human fallibility. Such laconic entries are comparatively rare, however. Usually, Josselin searches his soul with earnest introspection. He is constantly torn between a great eagerness to fulfil his religious obligations and the painful realisation that he fails to do so. Thus, his interiority is not simply lacking or defective but very complex and colourful:

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[29 October 1648] this weeke I bestowed some time in the studdy of Hebrew, vita brevis ars longa, and much time I have and doe misspend, and I find it hard to redeeme the time; the lord good to mee in keeping me from sins and sorrowes that my heart is subject to, and are in and upon others, oh keepe my feete in up rightness; the lord in his mercy letts me see the vanity of the creature, and in reference to death that gods time is best. (1976: 143)

In this entry, Josselin confesses that he has “misspen[t]” his time, which he regrets and hopes to “redeem”. Furthermore, the entry relates his anxious attempts to re-establish an inner relationship with God, a relationship that is foundational for his identity. The verbal structure of the passages resembles a prayer, as Josselin addresses God directly. In most of the sentences, the diarist uses the hortatory subjunctive, which makes him the grammatical object of the phrase. God, by contrast, is the powerful subject who “keep[s]”—a verb that Josselin uses twice in one sentence—him from “sins”. While Josselin does articulate a strong sense of inwardness, this does not bestow him with individual agency in any modern sense. The entry continues as follows, the lord was good and mercifull to mee in the Sabbath, in the word preached, oh that it might be practiced of me and mine, in giving me strength, neither did I much feele the sorenes of my belly, and truly lord I may say it was good it should be thus with me, for by this thou hast lett me see my emptines, and vanity, and made me to ruminate on, and minde my condicon, and earnestly to long for thy grace and mercy, yea sins in particular discovered and stirred up indignacon, and resolucion and watchfulnes against them, so that it was good I was afflicted, and trouble was light gentle, and shall bee but for a time and this as an kind wind to drive me to god my haven, yea thou stirrest up my faith by it oh I will love the[e] my god, for thou dealest mercifully with mee. (ibid.)

Josselin again mentions his gratitude to God, who was “good and mercifull” to him. He then comments on a stomach ache (“sorenes of my belly”) from which he suffered earlier in the week, but which has now abated. Josselin is not just relieved that the sickness has subsided, but he also expresses gratitude that God has “sent” him the illness in the first place. The diarist interprets bodily pain as a divine intervention, as a “light and gentle” correction which encourages him to “ruminate” even more meticulously and ponder potential “sins” or “vanity” for which he feels

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great “indignacon”. He also expresses joy and love for God, who sends only “gentle” troubles to remind the diarist of his sinful “condicon”. As in earlier entries, Josselin articulates a sense of self that is passive and receptive. God gives him the “strength” to preach and pray and endure his illness; God bestows that very illness on Josselin and eases the pain. There is little that the diarist can do as an individual subject, except to interpret the signs God sends him. Josselin portrays himself as a vessel for God’s agency, and his physical pain “an kind wind to drive me to haven”. Moreover, the passage is marked by a language of feeling. Josselin, “see[s]” his “emptines” and “vanity”, and experiences “indignacon, and resolucion and watchfulnes against them”. Thus, Josselin’s self-portrait does not really translate into the idiom of individualism but hinges upon pious Protestant interiority: self-loathing is a providential sign; pain leads to a cathartic purge, but the future is still uncertain. Therefore, “watchfulness”, an anxious sense of anticipation, and a certain scepticism towards one’s own deeds and feelings are necessary. As Kathleen Lynch notes elsewhere, Josselin’s inwardness is “highly disciplined” and “at once personal and social” (2012: 4). The diarist is zealously trying to comply with God’s rules, and he keeps searching his soul rigorously for transgressions or sins. In the process, he articulates a sense of painful enjoyment, a jouissance. For Lacan, jouissance is marked by excess; it is always “too much” (Leader and Groves 1995: 140). The excessive quality of Josselin’s quest for pious inwardness presents itself in the language he uses, in his use of repetition, in exclamatory forms, his “yea’s” and “oh’s”, and in his choice of adjectives such as a “sweete, and savoury” when he describes the word of God: [7 May 1648] This weeke the Lord was good and mercifull to mee, and mine, in our health, peace, preservacion, only in this day my wife very ill with a fitt of a feaver […]: the lord good in preserving mee from grosse sins, but my heart is subject to unevennes, and vanitie, and haste, and in my haste to speake rashly, lord in mercy pardon mee, and direct mee I intreate thee the lord was good to me in the duty of the Sabbath, enabling mee with strength and making the word sweete, and savoury, the lord in mercy accept mee, and blesse the word that it may profitt many. (1976: 124–125)

Here, as in most other entries, Josselin starts with “tipping [his] hat” to divine providence, as Bedford, Davis, and Kelly put it (2007: 32). The next sentence announces a small yet significant contrast which is

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introduced by Josselin’s use of “but”. Josselin relates that his “heart” is prone to “unevennes” and “vanitie” and regrets having been impatient and “rash”. He resumes with a prayer in which he uses strikingly sensuous verbal imagery. Josselin entreats God to make his “word”, by which he probably means both his sermons and his everyday conversations with his family, “sweete, and savoury”. As in the previous passage, Josselin depicts himself both as a pious, obedient subject and as an imperfect, depraved sinner. Furthermore, he juxtaposes a variety of different emotions and images, ranging from painful regret to “sweete” longing and trust. Viewed through a Lacanian lens, Josselin constructs his inner life in terms of an ambivalent jouissance: the diarist enjoys being obedient and compliant, but almost paradoxically, he also enjoys his sense of deficiency or depravity. Josselin is neither unequivocally anxious nor is he content. His interiority is a complex blend of guilt, pain, and anxiety on the one hand and gratitude, relief, and sensuous enjoyment on the other.

Beyond Affective Piety Faith is one of the most crucial themes that runs through Josselin’s diary, but kinship relations and family matters are almost as important. Not only does Josselin mention his wife, children, neighbours, and friends very frequently, he also writes about these “significant others” (Mead 2001) with a great deal of affection. His wife Jane is usually “my deare wife”, his daughter Mary “my little Mary”, and their friend Mary Church “our good friend Mary”. He is also acutely aware of his own dependence on his wife, noting on 10 July 1649 upon a visit to his uncle, “[I] saw the sad condicon of a family without a mother, oh that I could blesse god for my wife, and pray for her, that shee might bee more my comfort” (1976: 172). Josselin’s children—his sons as well as his daughters—made their own marriage choices despite the unconditional obedience demanded of children by “Puritan” parenting tracts (see also Leverenz 1980: 58). Only very late in his life does he espouse the role of the patriarch. In 1677, he disinherits his son John, who apparently stole a large sum of money from his parents. However, as MacFarlane points out, “Josselin was exasperated and depressed by his wayward son, [but] he was very reluctant to disinherit him, always eager to look for signs of repentance” (1970: 123). Therefore, Josselin will surprise a reader schooled by Phillippe Ariès (1973), who asserts that early modern parents could not “afford” to grow emotionally attached to their children before they reached a certain

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maturity, and Lawrence Stone (1977), who, albeit from a different angle, suggests that parental and spousal affections were “less warm” (ibid.: 60) in the early modern era. The case of Josselin provides some important evidence for other readings of early modern practices of parenting (see for instance Pollock 1983; Seaver 1985; Jarzebowski 2010, 2016). Josselin portrays his relationship with his wife as based on mutual affection and respect. The entries in which he writes about his children are marked by a sense of tenderness and care that is particularly present when he writes about them falling ill. In this vein, Josselin minutely records every detail of the sickness of his newborn baby Ralph, who seems to have developed a serious lung disease (pneumonia or tuberculosis) shortly after his birth in a cold and wet February 1648/9. Josselin records the ups and downs and the fatal end of his son’s disease. These passages are particularly striking as they testify how Josselin is at great pains to put himself into an accepting, acquiescent frame of mind—as this is what his God wants from him—but does not actually manage to do so. Fulfilling his religious duty turns into an insurmountable challenge. The following passage is dated a few days after the birth of Ralph, who has fallen ill overnight: [17 February 1648/9] my child was ill, full of phlegme, wee sent for the physitian, he gave it syruppe of roses: it wrought well. my wife perswaded herselfe that it would die it was a very sicke childe indeed: I tooke my leave of it at night, not much expecting to see it alive, but god continued it to morning and it seemed to mee not hopeless: lord its thine. I leave it to thy disposing onely I pray thee give mee and my wife a submitting heart. in this weeke dyed in this towne: 1: woman in childbed and 2 children. […] 2 young children more, and one young woman the lord make mee sensible of my mercy. Mrs Mary would not goe home, but staid all night with our babe, hitherto my wife preserved from feavers, and upwards, the lord perfect her recovery, and if thou lord breake in with death into my family, oh make mee more carefull to live unto my god, and waite untill my change cometh. (1976: 112)

In this entry, Josselin is caught between fear and quiet resignation. He fears for his son’s life, seeks help from a physician, and tries to diagnose the boy with his own medical knowledge—the child was “full of phlegme”. The diarist also mentions other deaths that occurred in the community, which points to a certain anxiety that the child will suffer the same fate.

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Moreover, he tries to prepare himself for the death of the baby, recording that he “took [his] leave of it”. It appears to be of utmost importance to the diarist to accept whatever yoke God will give him. The invocation “lord its thine” conveys the sense that Josselin tries to submit to what he considers to be God’s will. At the same time, however, the entry also suggests that the diarist is struggling to be thus obedient and composed; he prays that God gives him a “submitting heart”, which demonstrates that he does not have a submitting heart after all. In the second half of the entry, the language becomes more volatile as the quiet and formulaic “the lord perfect her recovery” is followed by an anxious conditional clause “if thou lord breake in with death into my family”, which he leaves unfinished. Josselin appears to ponder a possibility which is too terrifying to think through—what would happen if the Lord brought death upon his family? He concludes his entry with a prayer (“make me more carefull”) and pleads with God to grant him an accepting frame of mind. Thus, the illness of his son confronts Josselin both with the terrible possibility of losing his child and God’s love. What if Josselin did not manage to bear his yoke and accept his fate? Moreover, Josselin keeps referring not just to his own emotions but to those of his wife: he recounts that Jane tries to “perswad[e] herselfe that it [the child, M.N.] would die”. He reflects upon Jane’s attempts to cope with the loss empathetically rather than disapprovingly. Josselin prays to God to “give mee and my wife a submitting heart”, implying that he is worried not just about his own firmness of faith but also that of his wife. One could, of course, argue that Josselin, as the pater familias, feels responsible for his wife’s piety. However, in this entry, as in many others, I simply see no evidence that Jane is subordinate to her husband, as it uses a language of affection and respect. The diarist does not judge Jane’s attempts to prepare herself for the death of the child. Rather, he records his wife’s emotions without comment or evaluation; they appear to be important in their own right. I am inclined to accept the possibility that there was a gap between the patriarchal teachings of the “spiritualised household” (Hill 1967) and the everyday life of the Josselin family. In this context, it is also worth noting that Josselin appears to find some comfort in the company that his family kept in the days following the birth and illness of the infant. He notes that “Mrs Mary would not goe home, but staid all night with our babe”, which implies that Mary Church (a close friend of the family) insisted on staying. Mary Church’s care for his family seems to reassure him.

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I would therefore conclude that Josselin not only constructs his life along notions of pious interiority, but also along interpersonal, relational lines. His family and his community play a prominent part in the diary, and they are described in an affectionate tone. As has been noted earlier, such interpersonal concepts of subjectivity overlap with the tenets of object relations theory. D.W. Winnicott debunks the myth of individualism, suggesting that we only acquire a sense of self in relation to our primary caregiver. He thus captures an important moment of relationality and dependence, which is part and parcel of subject formation. Winnicott’s insights are instructive for an interpretation of Josselin’s diary on two interrelated levels. On the level of content, Josselin’s entries are replete with what psychoanalysis calls “object relations”, as the earlier passage illustrates. Social and kinship relations play a crucial role for Josselin’s creation of narrative identity. He not only constructs himself as a pious obedient subject but also as a social being, as a person who shares affective ties to other people, ties that seem to be almost as important to him as his relationship with God. On a more metaphorical level, he creates an inner object, an imaginary addressee and listener figure, to whom the diarist can confide his religious anxieties. The diary “holds” and “contains” (to use Winnicott’s idiom) Josselin’s conflicting emotions and helps him to integrate the various feelings into a more or less cohesive identity. The object function of the diary is particularly visible in the entries in May 1650 when Josselin’s daughter Mary falls seriously ill. The passages in which Josselin relates her illness are marked by an even stronger sense that the diarist is torn between his strong affection for the child—he fears for her life and tries to do all he can to abate her pain—and a similarly urgent sense of religious duty, since his faith teaches him to be placid and accepting: [22 May 1650] my litle Mary, very weake, wee feared she was drawing on, feare came on my heart very much, but shee is not mine, but the Lords, […] shee would cry out, poore I, poore, I. I went downe to the pryory about a medicine […], as I came up, my heart cheered exceedingly, I was hopefull of her life, feare went of my heart wonderfully trough mercy […]. [23 May 1650] I am to feare my babe, but god will give me strength to trust in him, psal. 32.v.I.6. happiness is not in the waies of the vaine creature, but in the mercies of the living god. (1976: 201–202)

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Josselin relates that he is afraid that his daughter could die; he repeats the word “feare” three times. His language is coloured by a sense of affection and responsibility. As Josselin writes on the evening before her death in May 1650: “thou art better to mee then sonnes and daughters, though I value them above gold and jewells” (1976: 203). Crucially, however, Josselin also fears that his affection for his daughter might be too strong. He “knows” that he is not supposed to love her more than his God. Such a competition between the love for God and the love for children was not uncommon among Reformists, as Claudia Jarzebowski has shown (2010, 2016). Josselin is constantly caught between his fear for the life of his daughter and his knowledge that such emotions may prove potentially dangerous. He “values” his children “above gold and jewells”, but not above God himself. His conflicting emotions are conveyed in the small conjunction “though”, which may conceal a sense of despair and an unwillingness to “kisse the rod” (ibid.: 201) but also testifies to the presence of the ideology of obedience and passive acquiescence. Josselin is aware that the pious believer “bears his milde yoke”, as his fellow dissenter Milton put it, and accepts it placidly—even joyfully—if God decides to take the child from him. It is perhaps for this reason that Josselin constructs his fear as a force from without which afflicts him, rather than as an integral part of his interiority. He writes, “feare came on my heart very much” and “feare went from my heart”, and thus constructs “feare” as a strange agency from without. Josselin structures his narratives around Calvinist ideologies of affect regulation. However, in the passages surrounding the illness and death of his children, there is a sense that he also struggles to meet the demands of his faith. In June 1650, shortly after the death of his infant son Ralph and the death of Mary Church, a decade-long friend and companion to the Josselins who assisted Jane in all her births, Josselin seems to go through a spiritual crisis. On the day of the funeral he writes: [4 June 1650] This day my deare freind Mrs Mary Church and my sweete Ralph were buried togither in the church, […]. in some respect I see great mercy therein, for Satan lieth in waite to corrupt our affections and that mine were not, was gods aboundant grace, who keepes mee that though I fall yett I am not utterly cast downe. when Mrs Mary dyed, my heart trembled, and was perplexed in the dealings of the lord so sadly with us, and desiring god not to proceed on against

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us with his darts and arrowes; and looking backe into my wayes, and observing why god hath thus dealt with mee, the lord followed mee with that, sin no more, lest a worse thing happen unto thee; and the intimacion of god was that he would proceed no farther against mee or mine, and he would assist mee with his grace if I clave to him with a full purpose of heart, which I resolve, oh my god helpe mee, oh my god faile mee not, for in thee doe I putt my trust. (1976: 205)

The passage conveys the sense that Josselin writes in a moment of intense emotional agitation, particularly towards the end of the entry. He records that his heart “tremble[s]” and that he is “perplexed in the dealings of the lord”. The diarist does not seem to understand what God wants from him. It is one of the very few passages in which Josselin comes close to doubting God’s goodness. In a violent, lethal allegory, Josselin imagines God “proceed[s] […] against” him “with his darts and arrowes”. God is constructed as a Freudian “Über”-father, larger than life and ready to punish, even to kill, a “sadistic ethical instance” (Žižek 2006: 80), indeed. Josselin’s struggle with the impossible demands of his religion is accompanied by a frank depiction of emotions, which may hint towards a small amount of dissent. Thus, he qualifies the statement that he saw “great mercy” in the death of his son with the phrase “in some respect”, implying that he does not see the great mercy in God’s dealings in all aspects of the event. He uses a similar qualification when he writes, “I am not utterly cast downe”. The language grows more emotive in the next paragraph as he writes, “when Mrs Mary dyed, my heart trembled, and was perplexed in the dealings”. Josselin’s “trembl[ing] heart” is suggestive of terrible fear, and his “perplexion” hints at a thought too dangerous to record—the diarist no longer understands God’s ways and appears to be close to doubting God’s grace. I would conclude that the diary constructs a listener-­ figure who can take on two different roles: a castigatory, moralistic agency and a benevolent presence, a source of “abundance of outward mercies” (1976: 207). As I argued earlier, Calvinist thought pictures God both as a stern paternal authority but ultimately also as a maternal and nurturing figure. David Leverenz quotes a plethora of sermons, tracts, and diaries in which God is depicted as a “curiously motherly patriarch” (1980: 4). While some of Leverenz’s conclusions are somewhat bold and his reading may still echo the thematic, “diagnostic” tendencies in early psychoanalytic criticism, I do find his insights very enlightening with respect to the ambiguity

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in Reformist imagination. In Josselin’s diary, as in the sermons, ego-­ documents, and tracts analysed by Leverenz, God is constructed not just as a castigating father figure but also pictured as benevolent and nurturing. Josselin’s writing practices echo the ambiguity in reformist theology. In keeping a journal, Josselin attempts to comply with the demands of a patriarchal, if not a tyrannical God. However, he is also lured by the promise of finding nourishment, safety, and comfort in Christ, who is pictured as loving and generous. The diary is both object-seeking in the psychoanalytic sense, as it constructs a benevolent, nurturing “other” in whom the diarist can confide, and an instrument that disciplines the subject into pious obedience. The entries surrounding the burial of his daughter Mary further illustrate the shifting, liminal quality of Josselin’s diary. The entry reads like a blend of several genres, such as the sermon—it almost appears as if he is preaching himself into acquiescence—and a less rigorous form of expression, a self-expression which subtly undermines the content of the “sermon”: [26 May 1650] This morning all our hopes of Maries life was gone, to the Lord I have resigned her and with him I leave her, to receive her into his everlasting armes, when he seeth best, shee rests free from much paine […] and why are wee at any times unwilling, when god is about such a worke […] my heart could not but mourne over and for my babe, but I left it with the lord, and was quiett in my spirit, in gods taking it, to whom, I did freely resigne it […] [27 May 1650] This day a quarter past two in the afternoone my Mary fell asleepe in the Lord, her soule past into that rest where the body of Jesus, and the soule of the saints are, shee was: 8 yeares and 45 dayes old when shee dyed, my soule had aboundant cause to blesse god for her, who was our first fruites […] it was a pretious child, a bundle of myrrhe, a bundle of sweetnes, shee was a child of ten thousand, full of wisedome, woman-like gravity, knowledge […] it lived desired and dyed lamented, thy memory is and will bee sweete unto mee, […] [28 May 1650] This day my deare Mary was buried in Earles Colne church by the 2 uppermost seats […] I kist her lips last, and carefully laid up that body the soule being with Jesus it rests there till the resurrection. god gave mee a submitting heart to his will, and even a heart rejoycing in him for what he hath done for her. (1976: 203)

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When Josselin realises that Mary’s life cannot be saved, he attempts to prepare himself for her death and to reach a frame of mind of placid acquiescence. However, the entries also testify that such placid acceptance involves a great amount of psychological labour. He writes that his “heart could not but mourne” for his daughter, suggesting that a more obedient part of him wants to accept her death but a different part (“[his] heart”) resists. What is more, Josselin notes the precise age of Mary, who was “8 yeares and 45 dayes old when she dyed”, underlining the importance of every single day they spent together. He continues to praise his daughter, comparing her to a “bundle of myrrhe” and a “bundle of sweetnes”. He does not shy away from using hyperbolic language, calling the dead girl “a child of ten thousand”. In these images, he once more expresses his strong affection for his dead daughter whom he “kis[ses]” before burying her. At the same time, however, Josselin keeps emphasising that he accepts her death. Interestingly, this placid acceptance is also connected to God’s mercy; “god gave mee a submitting heart to his will, and even a heart rejoycing in him for what he hath done for her” (ibid.), writes Josselin, stressing that both his feelings and his control over them are actually lent to him by God. He stresses that he attempts to resign her to the Lord—to “let go of her”, as we would say today. The diarist even praises the Lord for having had his little daughter in the first place, instead of grappling with Him for taking her away. In this vein, his language vacillates between quiet resignation and painful “mourn[ing]”. Here, as in the passage quoted before, Josselin is anxious in the face of a stern paternal God, but he also confides this very fear to a benevolent listener. It is to this benign “object” that he can confess his grief and anxiety.

Conclusion The present chapter has shown that Josselin portrays himself as a pious, obedient subject, as a passive recipient of God’s grace or wrath. Even his body, his thoughts, and his emotions are constructed as instruments of communication with God, as lent to him by his Maker. There appears to be very little Josselin can actively perform as an individual. Unaided by God, Josselin is “empty” (1976: 205). With the help of his diurnal writing practices, Josselin disciplines himself into piety, into passive acquiescence, into becoming an obedient subject. Josselin ambivalently enjoys practising rigorous self-scrutiny, thus constructing a multifaceted interiority, in

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which self-loathing leads to sanctification, while intense feelings of guilt and depravity become cohesive rather than disruptive forces. At the same time, Josselin writes about his fears, his grief, and his affection in vivid detail. He does not simply record dry events, but also colours his narration with an emotive language. However, he embeds his emotions in a religious, pre-individualist framework. They are not explicitly viewed as “sources of the self”, as Charles Taylor (1989) would put it. In this vein, emotions and religion, affect and ideology are closely intertwined in Josselin’s diary. His piety shapes and frames the way he views his emotions, which are ambivalently pictured as disruptive and dangerous but also as helpful means in his struggle to discern God’s will. Conversely, his emotions constantly underpin his piety: God gives him a submitting or a contented heart. Even if Josselin tries to modulate and regulate his potentially dangerous grief and anxiety, he seems to think, paradoxically, that these attempts will be in vain if God does not somehow intervene. Josselin sees himself as a “victim”, as Bedford, Davis, and Kelly aptly put it (2007: 33), rather than an agent. Although he invests a great amount of energy and emotional effort in putting himself in a frame of mind that he considers adequate, he does not seem to think of these efforts as something that gives him agency. Paradoxical as it may seem with historical hindsight, Josselin constantly searches his soul, and yet he is not in control of his emotions, not even in control of his cognition. Centuries later, “we” may see his concern with his inner self as symptomatic of an emergent individualism, but Josselin would certainly not frame his writing practices in this way. For Josselin, writing about his life, his family, and his feelings is a pious practice, something he does as an act of faith. He writes because he belongs to the elect, not because he can win God’s love or save himself in keeping a diary. Although he appears to be very “active” from a twenty-first-century perspective, he would consider himself entirely dependent on God’s grace. This dependence on a significant “object” resonates strongly with Winnicott’s (2005) psychoanalytic theory according to which the subject cannot be divided from its object relations; there is no selfhood, however minimal, without dependency and relationality. Autonomy and individualism are fictions of modernity, fictions that were not available to Josselin. The “modernity” or familiarity of Josselin’s diary derives from the presence of strong emotions in his texts. It is his detailed narrative representation of emotions that creates the impression that Josselin is no “stranger” for the reader in the twenty-first century. The overall ideological framework in which his emotions are embedded is, however, marked by a great

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amount of historical alterity. The deepest infrastructure of his worldview is religion. His faith colours and shapes everything that happens to him, as well as his inner life and his emotions. Psychoanalysis gives me an idiom to navigate between historicist scepticism and a certain amount of empathy that I experience when reading his diary. Like Alan MacFarlane, I can find passages in the diary which I “understand” and which resonate with me, such as Josselin’s attempts to cope with his conflicting feelings; his affection for his children, wife, and friends; and his eagerness to belong to a group. The “object-seeking” elements in Josselin’s diary appear familiar and resonant. However, his desire to please a God that he believes would kill children out of jealousy presents me with a great amount of historical alterity.

References Ariès, Philippe (1973) Centuries of Childhood. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bedford, Ronald, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly (2007) Early Modern English Lives: Autobiography and Self-Representation 1500–1660. Aldershot: Ashgate. Fludernik, Monika (1996) Towards a “Natural” Narratology. London: Routledge. Hill, Christopher (1967) Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England. New York: Schocken Books. Jarzebowski, Claudia (2010) “Loss and Emotion in Funeral Works on Children in Seventeenth Century Germany.” Enduring Loss in Early Modern Germany: Cross Disciplinary Perspectives. Ed. Lynne Tatlock. Amsterdam: Brill. 187–214. ——— (2016) “Kindheit und Emotion.” Kinder und ihre Lebenswelten in der europäischen Frühen Neuzeit. Oldenburg: de Gruyter. Josselin, Ralph (1976) The Diary of Ralph Josselin: 1616–1683. Ed. Alan Macfarlane. London: Oxford University Press. Leader, Darian, and Judy Groves (1995) Introducing Lacan. Cambridge: Faber. Leverenz, David (1980) The Language of Puritan Feeling. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Lynch, Kathleen (2012) Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century Anglophone World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacFarlane, Alan (1970) The Family Life of Ralph Josselin. An Essay in Historical Anthropology. London: University Press. ——— (1976) “Introduction.” The Diary of Ralph Josselin. An Essay in Historical Anthropology. Ed. Alan MacFarlane. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. XIX–XXVI. ——— (1978) The Origins of English Individualism. Oxford: Blackwell. Maus, Katherine Eisaman (1995) Inwardness and Theatre in the English Renaissance. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Mead, George Herbert (2001) Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviourist. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Milton, John (1997) “When I consider.” [~1652–55]. Complete Shorter Poems. Ed. John Carey. Harlow: Pearson Education, 331–333. Pollock, Linda (1983) Forgotten Children. Parent-Child Relations between 1500 and 1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seaver, John (1985) Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-­ Century London. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Stone, Lawrence (1977) The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800. New York: Harper and Row. Taylor, Charles (1989) Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winnicott, Donald (2005) Playing and Reality [1978]. Routledge Classics. London and New York: Routledge. Žižek, Slavoj (2006) How to Read Lacan. London: Granta.

CHAPTER 7

Enjoying the Diary: Samuel Pepys and the Transitions of Diary-Writing

Unlike the diaries discussed in the previous chapters, Samuel Pepys’s Diary is often regarded as equal to other, more stylised autobiographical texts such as the letters of John Wilmot or Lady Anne Halkett’s Memoirs (see Glaser 2001). Robert Latham, the late editor of the Diary, praises Pepys’s “freshness and flexibility of language”, his capacity to “exactly reflect the impressions of the moment”, which makes Pepys “the most human and accessible of diarists and that gives the diary its special quality as a historical record” (1979: 7). Indeed, Pepys’s writing abounds with keen observations and a striking eye for detail. He recalls, for instance, how the Lord Chancellor “sleeps and snores” during Council privy meetings (Diary 1: 64), how he himself gets drunk during Charles II’s coronation ceremony, an experience which he enjoys but “feels sorry for” afterwards (Diary 2: 88), and how A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an “insipid ridiculous” play (Diary 3: 208). For these reasons, the Diary has not only been “raid[ed]” (Sherman 1996: 30) as a source for historical information, but also been read for pleasure and entertainment. This chapter will analyse the verbal structure of the Diary and the impression of “accessibility” that is created by the text. Why is it that my twenty-first-century reading habits can easily cope with a text that is set in a world so alien to my own? Why is a notorious adulterer and exploiter of women often seen as “schoolboyish” (Turner 1995: 96), as a child experimenting with adult sexuality (see Kunin 2004: 201)? And how adequate © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Nandi, Reading the Early Modern English Diary, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42327-8_7

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are these designations? For whom does Pepys create comical scenes when his Diary is written in shorthand, allegedly to hide it from prying eyes? The present chapter revolves around these questions. It starts with a brief sketch of the Diary’s editorial history and Pepys’s biography. In the ensuing sections, it discusses to what extent the Diary draws on earlier, Calvinist models of the form. In this context, I revisit Francis Barker’s “notorious” (Kohlmann 2010: 554) reading of Pepys as a “tormented Puritan” (1984: 8). In the second half, I will discuss to what extent the Diary serves as a Lacanian mirror creating an image of the diarist, which he enjoys. I will propose that the picture of the self created in the Diary only partly overlaps with what Lacan calls the “moi”, that is, an autonomous individual endowed with agency and power. Pepys’s sense of self, as I argue in the last section of this chapter, is also considerably social. The Diary is filled with references to social events, descriptions of the up and downs of Pepys’s marriage, and moments of emotional turmoil that ensue from these relationships. Just as Pepys’s success in the Stuart administration was considerably facilitated by the patronage of Edward Montagu and not based on Pepys’s work ethic alone, the construction of selfhood in the Diary vacillates between autonomy and dependence, between individualism and relationality.

Textual History Pepys never identifies the shorthand system in which he kept his Diary, but he most likely learnt it from John Shelton’s Tutor to Tachygraphy (1642), a widespread system also taught at Magdalen College. First attempts at transcribing the Diary were made by Lord Braybrooke in 1825, a “dilettante aristocrat” (Latham 1984: 121), who had no knowledge of Shelton’s manual (ibid.: 122). Later in the nineteenth century, the Diary went through several shortened and censored editions, the most extensive of which was published by H.B.  Wheatley in 1893–1899. Neither of these Victorian editors described their methods in dealing with the manuscript or provided philological commentary (ibid.: 126). Only in the 1970s did William Mathews, aided by Robert Latham (2000), undertake the immense task of putting together an edition that encompassed the text in its entirety. Biographers have struggled with the disparity between the richness of material with respect to Pepys’s life between 1660 and 1669 afforded by the Diary, and the comparative scarcity of information concerning the

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earlier and later years of his life. Claire Tomalin’s biography of Pepys, for instance, is divided into three parts comprising the years predating the Diary, the years covered by the Diary, and the 24 years “after the diary” (2002: 279). The second part, which covers only nine years of the diarist’s life, nevertheless consists of 200 pages, whereas the first part just fills 80; the last part comes out to about a 100 pages. Samuel Pepys (1633–1670), son of the tailor John Pepys and of his wife Margaret (née Kite), a former washmaid, was born as the fifth of 11 children on 23 February 1633 in London’s Fleet Street (ibid.: 3). Despite his lower-middle-class origins, the family originally came from Cambridgeshire and had landed connections there and in Huntingdonshire (see ibid.: 8–20). Pepys’s cousin Edward Montagu (later Earl of Sandwich), eight years Pepys’s senior, had a large place in the Commonwealth and would act as his patron (ibid.: 44–5, see also Allen 2003: 15). Pepys finished his schooling at St Paul’s, then one of London’s most strictly Reformist schools; John Milton was one of its most famous graduates (Tomalin 2002: 29). St Paul’s instilled Protestant values of hard work and diligence in the boys, and it is safe to say that “Pepys took to this regime” (ibid.). At school, Pepys developed a certain amount of admiration for Oliver Cromwell (also a graduate of St Paul’s), and the diarist even sneaked away from school to watch the execution of Charles I (Allen 2003: 16). As Claire Tomalin remarks, “[t]he Pepys who wrote the Diary had become on the whole hostile to puritanism and necessarily a royalist, but the St. Paul’s boy was a puritan and a parliamentarian” (2002: 30). It was also St Paul’s where Pepys acquired his skills in documentation and filing, which helped him to become one of the most successful administrators in early modern England and one of the world’s most famous diarists. The year 1660 was not only a pivotal point in British history but also a watershed in Pepys’s life. He played a crucial role in the Stuarts’ return to power and, in the year of Charles II’s coronation, became secretary of the Naval Board (ibid.: 102). During the 1660s, Pepys gradually evolved into a gentleman. In March 1660, he was addressed “esquire” for the first time (Allen 2003: 18). In the same year, he assumed a post on the Navy Board, which controlled most of the manpower and material needs of the Navy. Pepys allegedly had little knowledge about naval affairs when he took up the post, but he was a hard worker and soon excelled in his duties (see Tomalin 2002: 133–47). However, to attribute Pepys’s rise in status to his individual professionalism is to employ contemporary concepts in the analysis of earlier events. His early career in particular was shaped by feudal

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patterns, as he owed his rise largely to the protection of his older cousin Montagu. When the latter was sent to serve as Ambassador to Spain in 1665, Pepys could no longer rely on the support of his influential cousin. Thus, his later career is likely to have been “entirely of his own making” (Allen 2003: 21). The Diary, however, captures not only Pepys’s career but also the ups and downs of his marriage with Elizabeth St Michel, the daughter of an impoverished French gentleman (Tomalin 2002: 51). Pepys was “a domestic bully”, as Brooke Allen writes (2003: 19), and a serial adulterer if ever there was one, but Elizabeth never lapsed into the role of victim. She felt free to give vent to her anger, and her rages were “terrifying as Lady Macbeth” when she found out that her husband had slept with their servant-companion Deborah Willet (Tomalin 2002: 274). The couple remained childless, probably because of a dangerous operation Pepys underwent in 1658 which resulted in continuing genito-urinary disorders (see ibid.: 62–3). Elizabeth fell ill shortly after Pepys abandoned his diary in 1669 and died in the same summer. Pepys never married again, but for 33 years, he had a relationship with Mary Skinner, with whom he shared a suite of rooms in the house of his lifelong friend William Hewer in Clapham. Pepys was buried on 4 June 1703 at St Olave, Hart Street, in the City of London. Pepys’s Reformist sympathies were never pious, but, paradoxical as it might sound, strictly secular. As Christopher Hill (1967) pointed out many years ago, “[f]or Pepys, the whole accent was secular: neither life after death nor the kingdom of heaven on earth interested him much” (1985: 271). Pepys certainly admired the Protestant work ethic, but not its theology (see also Allen 2003: 16). In this vein, Pepys frequently thanks the Lord for his financial successes, but he typically attributes these to his own diligence (von Greyerz 1994: 143). For these reasons, Benjamin Kohlmann locates Pepys within an emergent discourse in which social climbers such as Pepys fashion themselves as “men of sobriety and buisnes” (2010). Kohlmann’s and von Greyerz’s analyses differ substantially from Francis Barker’s influential reading of The Diary. Relying on a Foucauldian framework, Barker focusses on the emergence of the bourgeois subject and notions of privacy. He suggests that the late seventeenth century witnessed a tremendous shift in the way the body is represented. According to Barker, the Jacobean stage was still concerned with the body as spectacle, as something to be seen and exhibited, and only in the course of the Civil

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War and the radicalisation of Protestantism did the body become silenced and invisible. Referencing an entry in which Pepys recalls having read a “lewd book” and burnt it afterwards, Barker argues that Pepys is driven by guilt, silence and textuality. Forbidden to speak and yet incited to discourse, and therefore speaking obliquely in another place. Who says sing when he means fuck, who fears sex and calls it smallpox, who enjoys sex and calls it reading, who is fascinated and terrified by texts and so reads them once, but only for information’s sake, who is sober and drunk. Who would rather burn his body, who would rather go blind, but who, as in the storm of rage with which he tears, elsewhere in the Diary, his wife’s pathetic love letters, obliterates the texts instead. (1984: 9)

In this vein, Barker concludes that the body is associated with shame; physical desires and sexual transgressions are tucked away in secret, intimate discourse, that is, the Diary: “Where body was, [diary] shall be”. Barker’s reading of the Diary, albeit original at the time, is fraught with sweeping generalisations about the seventeenth century. As Sylvana Thomaselli argued already shortly after the publication of The Tremulous Private Body, the body as spectacle did not disappear in the late seventeenth century but remained a topos in painting and on the Restoration stage (1985: 672). Indeed, Barker is conspicuously silent about Restoration drama, which Pepys enjoyed attending and watching (see Payne 2015). By now, readings of the Diary have shifted in focus, have a different textual basis, and thus arrive at very different conclusions (see, for instance, Berger 1998; Sherman 1996; Turner 1995). Francis Barker relied on the 1957 edition Selections from the Diaries (Gibson 1957), which, in turn, used selections from the late-nineteenth-century edition of the Diary (see Barker 1984: vii). Since this version was heavily censored and echoes the Victorian prudishness of his editors rather than that of the diarist, Barker’s reading may be considered obsolete. James Turner argues: “Barker unfortunately uses a twice-bowdlerised text, a selection made for schoolchildren from the prudish Victorian edition; his larger thesis thus collapses” (1995: 96). Yet, Turner’s conclusions could themselves be premature. Barker raises pertinent questions about the status of desire and enjoyment in the Diary and about its relationship to an emergent private sphere. Barker is merely wrong to assume that the Diary already attests to a modern division between public and private realms in which the body is relegated to the

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latter. Instead, the Diary confirms that the division between public and private was not yet stable in Restoration London, much along the lines supported by historical anthropologists such as Gabriele Jancke (2005) and Joachim Eibach (2011). According to Gabriele Jancke, space had a different meaning in the early modern era. The early modern bed, for instance, was not considered an intimate refuge; it was common to share a bed with complete strangers in guesthouses (2005: 5). Also, early modern notions of hospitality demanded that a host offer his guests to share the bed with them. The bourgeois notion of the privacy of the bedchamber was not available to most of Pepys’s contemporaries (ibid.). In this vein, Pepys himself records on 17 March 1660 that he was invited to sleep in the bed of his host, Mr. Laud (ibid.; Diary 1: 90). Furthermore, most early modern houses did not even have a separate sleeping room. The architectural design for bedrooms usually consisted in a larger room, which served as living room and bedchamber at the same time (Eibach 2011). It was only after the Great Fire in 1666 that houses in London were built to have private closets, parlours, or dining rooms, into which guests could be invited (ibid.: 624–5). Moreover, this “passion for privacy” (Heyl 2004) can only be observed among the elites; the lower classes continued to live under crammed conditions, often sharing a bed with other people up until the early nineteenth century (Eibach 2011: 625). For these reasons, it is crucial to find a reading of the passages in which Pepys relates his (private?) erotic adventures that acknowledge the historical gulf that separates us from Pepys’s Restoration London while conceding that the only theoretical frameworks we have are those coined in the last decades. Such a reading would have to take into account that Pepys did indeed write in the privacy of his closet but would also have to acknowledge the diarists’ conspicuous concern with community and sociability. It is my contention that a historically informed psychoanalytic framework does justice both to the alterity of Pepys’s world and to the Diary’s curious accessibility and readability.

The “Pleasure That Comes from Hard Work” Pepys was the most successful accountant of the Restoration period; and it is plausible that his success as an accountant and the fame of the Diary hinge upon Pepys’s attention to detail, his passion for documenting everything he saw (on his “documentary desire”, see also Berger 1998). Stuart Sherman characterises the Diary as a text marked by “omniprehensility”,

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which “gives the impression of grabbing hold of everything the diarist encounters” (1996: 31–2). Pepys also had a knack of handling money, both as a naval administrator and as a private person. Many of his diary entries, particularly those written at the time when his career was still in the making, hint at a certain phobia of overspending. With respect to his parsimony and his desire to “grow rich” (Diary 3: 40), he might be described as a Weberian Protestant: [3 March 1662] I set to make some strict rules for my future practice in my expenses, which I did bind myself in the presence of God by oath to observe, upon penaltys therein set down. And I do not doubt but hereafter to give a good account of my time and to grow rich—for I do find a great deal more of content in those few days that I do spend well about my business then in all the pleasures of a whole week. (Diary 3: 40)

Many critics have read such entries as testimony to his radical Protestant education at St. Paul’s, concluding that “[t]hroughout his Diary, Pepys vacillates between a sense of duty instilled in him by his Puritanical upbringing and the desire to circumvent the rules” (Glaser 2001: 190; see also Hill 1985: 259). However, on closer inspection, I do not actually see a real gap between dutifulness and pleasure in the entry. For Pepys, the two are connected, as he is sure to “find a great deal […] of content” in being frugal. Furthermore, Pepys does mention God, but He merely serves an instance to remind Pepys of the rules that he himself has set down. God does not feature as the authority who made the rules, nor as a castigatory figure who will punish the diarist for breaking them. Pepys himself “set[s] to make some strict rules for [his] future expenses” to which he “bind[s] [him]self in the presence of God” (ibid.). Therefore, God occupies the role of a witness of Pepys’s own regime, but not that of its king, so to speak. If Pepys has a guilty conscience (and I see little evidence that he does), it is relatively independent from religion. Pepys goes on to relate another promise he makes to himself: he intends to “give a good account of [his] time” (ibid.), implying that he will keep his journal on a regular basis. Here, the diary is literally connected to the practice of accounting: Pepys intends to keep an eye on the way he spends his time and his money. The Diary serves as a witness of Pepys’s deeds and is thus put on a par with God, who also is a witness rather than the maker of rules.

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Unlike earlier Protestant diarists, Pepys does not relate painful pangs of guilt, nor does he even reproach himself. On the contrary, the plan of exercising more self-control fills the diarist with optimism and joy. His “strict rules” for future expenses curtail his behaviour but are also strangely rewarding. Pepys’s plan to go on what we would now call a “shopping diet” is not that of the plagued Calvinist, but more akin to Freud’s notion of the “secondary gain of being ill” (“sekundärer Krankheitsgewinn”), a concept Freud coins to describe unconscious underpinnings of illness (Freud and Breuer 1996). For Freud, the “primary gain of being ill” consists of internal or direct advantages that patients derive from their symptoms: for example, they can avoid situations that are perceived as unpleasant. The “secondary gain of being ill” points to the external benefits that the sick person can derive from existing symptoms, such as the gain in attention and consideration created by his or her environment (ibid.). Indeed, Pepys has mastered the art of extracting something positive out of something negative. He gains pleasure from hard work, from parsimony, and from itemising. I do not think that there is a painful conflict “between different aspects of his own personality” (Hill 1985: 259), but he quite ingeniously connects his “fun-loving” and “rigid” (Glaser 2001: 190) side, in making rigidity a fun business, so to speak. Pepys even appears to be aware of the weird workings of jouissance, as the following entry suggests: [10 August 1663] Such a folly I am come to now, that whereas my delight was in multitude of books and spending money in that and buying away of other things, now that I am become a better husband and have left off buying, now my delight is in the neatness of everything and so cannot be pleased with anything unless it be very neat; which is a strange folly. (Diary 6: 270)

Pepys suggests that there is something excessive in his observation of rules and his obsessive “delight” in “the neatness of everything”, just as there seems to have been something excessive in his “spending money” earlier in the same year. In a gesture of self-doubling, he monitors his habit of self-monitoring, realising that his excessive “neatness” is a “strange folly”. The verbal structure of the passage mirrors Pepys’s self-doubling as he begins and ends the entry with the word “folly”. Pepys’s self-awareness, his insight into the workings of his own jouissance, can be read as a sign of

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his “subjection” but also as a strategy of transgressing norms, of establishing a modicum of autonomy. He feels “great content” in saving money; he enjoys excessive neatness but knows that this may well be a folly. For the bourgeois social climber that Pepys certainly was, there is a certain kind of eroticism in hard work, a sensuality in the strict schedule, a sexiness in professionalism. He does not just perform the role of the “man of sobriety and buisnes” (Kohlmann 2010); Pepys loves his job. Thus, Barker’s view of Pepys as the emergent bourgeois figure whose illusion of autonomy lies in exercising control over unruly desires is not entirely wrong, but incomplete. Pepys’s proverbial “genius for happiness” (Latham 1979: 8) lies in the way he uses the norms that were available to him. In this vein, Pepys often connects social idleness and work. For the bourgeois gentilhomme Samuel Pepys, idleness was not necessarily, or not exclusively, the absence of work. He could use social idleness to “network” as we would say today, to forge social relationships that might be useful for his career. Thus, to a certain extent, dinner parties or visits to the theatre were social duties for Pepys, but these could still be very pleasurable: [26 October 1660] I up early, it being my Lord Mayors Day […], and neglecting my office, I went to the Wardrobe, where I met my Lady Sandwich and all the children. Where after drinking of some strange and incomparable good claret of Mr. Rumballs […] I to one Mr. Isakson’s, a linendraper at the Key in Cheapside—where there was a company of fine ladies and we were very civilly treated and had a very good place to see the pageants. (Diary 1: 276–77)

Pepys here writes about neglecting his office without any sense of Calvinist guilt. Rather, he records the memory of the “incomparable good claret” with relish. Though raised with a Protestant work ethic, Pepys nevertheless enjoys the pleasures of a leisured life and the “company of fine ladies”. The merry crowd does nothing in a productive sense; and yet, Pepys forges the social network he needs for his career in the Stuart administration in such moments of idle socialising. In a similar vein, Pepys quite literally connects sex and work. Many of his erotic encounters actually take place at his office rather than in the privacy of his bedchamber. As Aaron Kunin has pointed out: “One of Pepys’s main activities in his official capacity as naval administrator seems to have been kissing, groping, and masturbating the wives of sailors and

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ships’ carpenters in exchange for promotion of their husbands” (Kunin 2004: 202). In August 1665, for instance, one Mr. Robins, an old “waterman”, tries to negotiate the release of his son, who has been pressed into the service of the Navy. Mr. Robins brings his daughter with him and leaves her with Pepys as some sort of “gift”. When alone with the poor woman, Pepys has her masturbate him: “An jo haze ella mettre su mano upon my pragma hasta hazer la cosa in su mano” (Diary 6. 23.8.1665: 202). Like an early modern predecessor of Harvey Weinstein, the diarist exploits his position of power; he does not even pretend that the sexual encounter was based on mutual consent, repeating with glee that he did “what he would”. Mrs. Robins does not want to be touched by him, but he ignores her resistance: “Pero ella ne voulut permettre que je ponebam meam manum a ella” (Diary 6: 202). Pepys’s behavioural pattern is not that of the potentially guilt-ridden bourgeois who indulges in illicit pleasures. He might intuit that he is wrong, but he is also aware that he is protected by a feudal system of service and rewards, in which “the office, like the household [was] governed by exchanges of sexual favours” (Kunin 2004: 204). Therefore, I cannot find any textual clues for the reading that sex, or even sexual assaults, are represented as “furtive” or “guilty” (Pearlman 1983: 43). For Pepys, “business” is not corrupt[ed] by “pleasure” (ibid.: 47). He only very rarely sees a conflict between the two. In the aforementioned episode, the contrary is the case. Pepys quite ruthlessly exploits his professional success and position of power for what he considers erotic adventures. Concomitantly, Pepys’s use of foreign languages when writing about sex is not cogently a symptom of his shame. Pepys might as well have found the use of Mediterranean languages titillating as Harry Berger suggests (1998). Pepys’s doubles his jouissance of working in the office by using it for sexual purposes, and he doubles it again by recording his action in his Diary. His erotic metaphor entails a plus-de-jouir, a surplus jouissance, rather than a shameful attempt to hide his illicit deeds from the gaze of a (real or imagined) Other. Therefore, the frequent allegation that Pepys’s erotic miniature-­ narratives are naïve and “innocent” like that of a “schoolboy” (Turner 1995: 96) is not convincing. In the aforementioned episode, Pepys is clearly an exploiter of women and sexual aggressor. For critics like Turner, Pepys is caught up in an early, “oral” stage of this psycho-social development. Such teleological readings of psychoanalysis, which distinguish

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between “mature” and “infantile” sexuality, have been contested within the discipline itself as well as by gender critics, such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1993). What is more, even if we were to embrace such a teleology, there is nothing naïve about Pepys’s exploiting the wives and daughters of sailors. He knows that he is protected by a patriarchal feudal system when he forces these women into sexual acts. Pepys’s accounts of his sexual conquests overlap with theatre plays of the Restoration libertin (see Kunin 2004: 197; Tilmouth 2007: 7), a figure devoid of sexual restraint and bourgeois moral qualms, rather than being opposed to them. The diarist creates self-flattering images as a social climber, as a sexual adventurer, and so forth.

Lacan with Pepys The Diary is replete with references to vision and observation, and marked by a novelistic, or even historiographic, eye for detail. But although Pepys’s gaze could be called panoptic—is there anything he does not see and describe?—he does not seem to be interested in exercising normative power or control. Watching, observing, and gazing are described with a sense of hedonistic (rather than sadistic) enjoyment. Pepys’s reliance on verbs of gazing and looking thus resonate with what Jacques Lacan calls the “jubilant activity” of the subject in the formation of the self in the mirror stage (2001/1977: 4) rather than with Foucauldian models of total subjection. The Diary’s constructions of self are reminiscent of the Lacanian mirror scene in more than one way. Pepys models his self-images on certain idealised figures that were culturally available at the time: the libertin, the “man of buisnes’ (Kohlmann 2010), the good husband (in the economic sense of the term). Furthermore, Pepys’s self-constructions often convey a sense of joy, pleasure, and excess. As Robert Latham points out, the diarist’s pet rhetorical figure is hyperbole and his favourite adjective “mighty”: the language of the diary often reflects his [Pepys’s; M.N.] excitement; superlatives flow […] Each successive pleasure was the best. Frances Stuart is ‘the beautifullest creature that I ever saw in my life’; Mrs Knepp ‘sings the noblest that ever I heard in my life’; Nell Gwyn’s acting is such as ‘I never believe in the world before’. (Latham 1979: 9)

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We can add a plethora of examples to Latham’s list. The party at the Duke of Albemarle’s is “the best company for musique I ever was in my life, which I could live and die in” (Diary 6: 320). Pepys spends “a mighty fine evening” (ibid.: 158) at the Swan. Lord Lauderdale is a man “of mighty good reason and judgement” (ibid.: 155). Mr. Batten at least appears to be “mightily kind” (ibid.: 69), although he may be a cheat, as Pepys suspects. Robert Latham therefore concludes that the historical person Samuel Pepys must have possessed a “genius for happiness”: One characteristic stands out above all others in Pepys’s self-portrait—his genius for happiness. Anxiety and fear could plague him, but not for long […]. He often remarks with contentment on his good fortune, and thanks God for it. He could extract extraordinary pleasure from ordinary experience—from wearing a new coat, from the company of children, from a morning spent knocking up nails in the house. (1979: 8)

Latham describes the experiences many readers of the Diary—including myself—share. Later interpretations follow Latham’s conclusions at least partly as they highlight the naivité of Pepys’s narrative voice (Pearlman 1983; Turner 1995). Given the affective quality of many diary entries, I can see why one would arrive at these conclusions. I am a bit chary, however, with respect to the distinction between childlike naivité and adult sobriety. It appears to me that the Diary blends the two modes of writing. Pepys does use hyperboles and adverbs connoting feelings of happiness and joy, but he also uses constructions of self-distancing: [26 February 1666] When I consider the manner of my going hither, with a coach and four horses, and servants and a woman with us, and coming hither, being so much made of, and used with that state, and all in fine weather, and no fears nor cares upon me, I do think myself obliged to think myself happy, and do look upon myself at this time in the happiest occasion a man can be; and whereas we take pains in expectation of future comfort and ease, I have taught myself to reflect upon myself at present as happy and enjoy myself in that consideration, and not only please myself with thoughts of future wealth, and forget the pleasures we at present enjoy. (Diary 8: 57)

Pepys here reminisces about his journey using joyful, happy language, repeating the adjective “happy” twice, and relating that he had “no fears

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nor cares”. His references to the good weather feed into the impression of auspiciousness; it is as if the heavens shine on our lucky diarist. Moreover, the entry is replete with references to status symbols such as “the coach”, “four horses”, and “servants”, indicating a more sober sense of knowledge about his social standing. The sense of naïve happiness is further undermined by Pepys’s reliance on vocabulary of looking and self-­ distancing. Pepys constructs himself as the object of his own gaze while also picturing himself as the subject who experiences the narrated events. He relates that he “look[s] upon [him]self” and “reflect[s] upon”. The entry thus doubles the narrative self—a self which looks and a self which is looked upon. The sense of doubling is also conveyed in the language of pedagogy that Pepys employs here. He splits his narrative self into a self that teaches and a self that is taught. Writing down these thoughts, Pepys then creates the third self, a self that is written about. These processes of distancing and self-doubling are also part of the “pleasure”. Another striking aspect of this passage is Pepys’s concern with time. He foregoes any desire to “please” himself “with thoughts of future wealth”, which might lead him to “forget the pleasures we at present enjoy”. Thus, he teaches himself to cherish the moment rather than indulging in nostalgia or projecting future pleasures. The passage goes on to record Pepys’s afternoon at Windsor: [26 January 1665/1966] So took coach to Windsor and the Guarter, and thither sent for Dr. Childe—who came to us, and carried us to St. Georges Chapel […]. And hither comes cushions to us, and a young singing-boy to bring us a copy of the antheme to be sung. And here, for our sakes, had his anthem and the great service sung extraordinary, only to entertain us. It is a noble place endeed, […]. This being done, to the King’s house and to observe the neatness and contrivance of the house and gates; it is the most romantique [sic] castle that is in this world. But Lord, the prospect that it is the balcone in the Queen’s lodgings, and the tarrace and walk, are strange to consider, being the best in the world, sure. Infinitely satisfied, I and my wife with all this; she being in all points mightily pleased too, which added to my pleasure. (Diary 8: 59)

The entry is several pages long, which illustrates that Pepys tries to capture every minute detail of the “extraordinary” event and of the “mighty” happiness it brought. Pepys notes with a sense of joyful surprise all the services he received at St Georges Chapel: cushions are fetched for him, the

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singing boy brings “a copy of the antheme to be sung”, “the anthem and the service extraordinary” are sung for his sake, exclusively for his and his wife’s “entertainment”. Pepys notes that he was “infinitely satisfied”. His wife’s happiness and contentment “add[s] to [his] pleasure”. Pepys’s frequent use of hyperbole (“infinitely”, “mightily”, “extraordinary”, “the most romantique castle that is in the world”) highlights the excitement and joy that the diarist associates with the event. Passages such as that mentioned earlier share many characteristics of Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage. The self created on the pages of the Diary “greets its mirror image in a flutter of jubilant activity” (Lacan 2001/1977: 1). It is a narcissistic self, whose splendour is reflected back in the narrative remediation of the Diary. There is, however, also a crucial difference between the scene described by Pepys and the Lacanian scenario. While the Lacanian infant is alone with its mirror image, the aforementioned quoted passage is marked by sociability. Pepys may have written the passage in the privacy of his chamber, but the passage itself revolves around a social event. Not only do other people serve as a mirror for his sense of self, but Pepys is also keenly aware of their feelings and interiority: his wife’s pleasure doubles his own pleasure, and the fact that others do their best to please him pleases him tremendously. Pepys may create an idealised, narcissistic fiction of himself, but this fictive self relies heavily on social relations, on affective ties, and on public visibility. Pepys’s Diary thus wavers between constructing a Lacanian, individualist self and more relational, intersubjective forms of personhood. In Pepys’s world, these two forms of selfhood are not mutually exclusive, but they are all contained in the repertoire of the Diary.

Objects and/in the Diary The social quality of the Diary is best illustrated in entries relating to Pepys’s interactions with his family or friends. More often than not, other people are constructed as following their own agenda, which may well compete with Pepys’s own. For example, the diarist records that he is excessively jealous when he realises that other men take an interest in his wife Elizabeth: [24 May 1663] To church […] and over against our gallery espied Pembleton and saw him leer upon my wife all the sermon I taking notice of him, and my wife

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upon him; and I observed she made a curtsey to him at coming out, without taking notice to me at all upon it; which with the consideration of her being desirous these two last Lord Days to go to church both forenoon and afternoon, doth really make me suspect something more than the ordinary, though I loath to think the worst. But I must have patience and get her into the country. (1979: 66; my emphasis)

The passage is brimming with verbs connoting seeing or observing. Pepys “espies” Pembleton who “leers” at his wife, although Pembleton is unaware of Pepys’s gaze. Pembleton, in turn, is spellbound by the sight of Elizabeth Pepys, who “notices” him and returns his gaze—she curtsies. Neither of the two appears aware that they are being observed by Pepys. Intriguingly, however, Pepys’s jealous gaze is endowed with neither agency nor control. The flirting couple does as it pleases; the two are not intimidated by Pepys’s presence. Pepys plans to keep his wife away from Pembleton and to thus regain control, but the very fact that he makes such desperate plans only illustrates his actual weakness. With historical hindsight, it is impossible to tell whether Elizabeth and Pembleton were actually flirting, or whether the flirtation occurs merely in Pepys’s head. In this scene of gazing, mirroring, and reflecting, Pepys may well confuse Pembleton’s desirous “leer[ing]” with his own. Pepys and Pembleton (is the alliteration a coincidence, or does Pepys see himself in Pembleton because of it?) seem to swap positions. The Restoration libertin becomes his own unlucky counterpart—the cuckold. The greatest irony is that the event took place during a church service. Instead of being a safeguard of order and patriarchal control, the church here is a setting for adulterous desires and gazes, a stage for Restoration comedy en miniature. Thus, Pepys’s gaze here is quite powerful. He might observe what is happening, but he is quite helpless as an observer. His gaze does not endow him with agency or mastery. This sense of helplessness is conveyed even more resonantly in the passages in which Pepys writes about disease, death, and in his famous records of the Great Fire in 1666: [2 September 1666] Lords Day. […] Jane called us up, about 3 in the morning, to tell us of a great fire they saw in the City. So I rose, and slipped on my nightgown and went to her window, and thought it to be on the back side of Markelane at

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the furthest; but being unused to such fires as fallowed, I thought it far off enough, and so went to bed again and to sleep […] About 7 rose again to dress myself, and there looked out at the window and saw the fire […] By and by Jane comes and tells me that she hears that above 300 houses have been burned down tonight by the fire we saw, and that it was now burning down all Fishstreet by London Bridge. So I made myself ready presently, and walked to the Tower and there got up upon the high places […] and there I did see the houses at that end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire on this and the other side the end of the bridge—which, among other people, did trouble me for poor little Michell and our Sarah on the Bridge. So down, with my heart full of trouble, to the Lieutenant of the Tower, who tells me that it begun this morning in the King’s baker’s house in Pudding lane and that it hath burnt down most part of Fishstreete already. So I down to the waterside and there got a boat and through bridge, and there saw a lamentable fire. […] Poor people staying in their houses as long as the very fire touched them, and then running into boats […] And among other things, the poor pigeons I perceive were loath to leave their houses, but hovered over the windows and balconies till they were some of them burned, their wings, and fell down. Having stayed, and in an hour’s time seen the fire rage every way, and nobody to my sight endeavoring to quench it, but to remove their goods and leave all to the fire […] To Whitehall and there up to the King’s closet in the chapel, where people came about me and I did give them an account [which, M.N.] dismayed them all; and the word was carried in to the King and Duke of York what I saw, and that unless his Majesty did command houses to be pulled down, nothing could stop the fire. (Diary 8: 267–9)

Despite its immediacy and urgency, the passage was actually composed several weeks after the outbreak of the Fire (see Sherman 1996: 94), when Pepys had more time and peace of mind to write a lengthy entry. With its surprising turns—Pepys first assumes that the fire is far away and therefore goes back to bed—the entry has the quality of narrative in the classical sense of the term. Furthermore, Pepys’s reconstruction of the events conveys a sense of devastating powerlessness. The diarist’s gaze is not endowed with control—he may well see the fire, but there is nothing he (or anybody else) can do to quench it. He records not only the material destruction of London, but also the reactions of his fellow Londoners and his own feelings of empathy. He recalls with sympathy how “the poor people” stay in their houses until it is almost too late. When he writes about the bizarre sight of the pigeons catching fire, he repeats the adjective “poor”, this

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time referring to the birds who “loath” to leave their homes, painfully mirroring the behaviour of the humans. It may be a bit of a stretch to say that Pepys’s social sense of self transgresses the species barrier, but the importance of “objects”, of Pepys’s surroundings—human and non-human— can hardly be debated. Pepys fears for his property, but he also expresses his concern for his fellow Londoners in a way that appears perfectly genuine. In this entry, the ironic distance so characteristic of the rest of the Diary is entirely absent. Instead, Pepys notes that he is “troubled” and expresses his helplessness. In the following excerpt, Pepys returns from Whitehall to his own house and takes a boat down the Thames to see a bit more, but the closer he gets to the fire, the more his vision is impaired by the smoke and sparks: [22 September 1666] So near the fire as we could for the smoke; and all over the Thames, with one’s face in the wind you were almost burned with a shower of firedrops— this is very true—so as houses were burned by these drops and flakes of fire, three or four, nay five or six houses one from another. […] and as it grow darker, appeared more and more, and in corners and upon steeples and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the City, in a most horrid malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire. […] It made me weep to see it. The churches, houses, all on fire and flaming at once, and a horrid noise the flames made, and the cracking of houses at their ruine. So home with a sad heart. (Diary 8: 271–2)

Pepys juxtaposes the sight of London destroyed with the threat of losing his vision. His gaze is not only powerless, it is under threat of annihilation. He is almost “burned with a shower of firedrops”. As in earlier passages, hyperbole flows, this time conveying horror and devastation. Pepys’s writes about a “horrid malicious bloody flame”, which he contrasts with the homely “fine flame of an ordinary fire”. The sound the fire makes is a “horrid noise” which is accompanied by the “cracking of houses”. Pepys’s depiction might be read as anticipating the aesthetics of the sublime. However, unlike Burke or Kant, Pepys does not construct the sublime from a safe distance. In Pepys’s 1666 London, there are no safe places. What is more, Pepys describes the experience as devastating. While the Romantic sublime endows the writer with a clearer sense of self, the diarist is almost destroyed by the experience. Both the destruction of

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London’s “churches and houses” and the threat the fire poses to his own home eventually reduce him to tears. It is in passages like these that I can see the “boyish” innocence and frankness that is sometimes associated with the Diary (Turner 1995: 96). Pepys’s frankness regarding his emotional life is also present in the following entry, in which he records the illness and ensuing death of his mother: [25 March 1667] Lady day […] Thence home, and there I find letters from my brother which tell me that yesterday, when he wrote, my mother did rattle in the throat, which though I have a good while suspected, did much surprise me; yet was obliged to sup at Sir W. Penn’s, and my wife; and there counterfeited some little mirth, but my heart was sad; and so home after supper and to bed, and much troubled in my sleep with dreams of my being crying at my mother’s bedside, laying my head over hers and crying, she almost dead and dying, and so waked, but which is strange, methought she had hair on her face, and not the same kind of face as my mother really has; but yet did not consider that, but did weep over her as my mother—whose soul God have mercy of. (Diary 8: 129)

In this passage, Pepys describes genuine pain and sadness over the death of his mother. He notes that his “heart was sad” during a social dinner he was “obliged” to attend. He tells his diary that he “counterfeited some little mirth” on that occasion, but clearly his behaviour does not mirror his actual feelings. The diarist goes on to write that he was “much troubled” even in his sleep. He dreams of “crying” at his mother’s dying bed, and “laying [his] head over hers”. Moreover, the entry is marked by Pepys’s characteristic attention to detail: he learns through a letter that his “mother did rattle in the throat”—rather than simply writing that she passed away. He relates the dream in vivid detail: the tender gesture of laying his head on hers, his tears, and then the bizarre detail that his mother “had hair on her face, and not the same kind of face” as she actually does. By dint of his attention to detail and his use of emotion words (“surprised”, “sad”, “crying”, “weep”), Pepys creates a sense of immediacy and emotional urgency, but there is also a moment of comic distance in it. Pepys’s narrative is detailed and expressive, and yet also “contained” as Winnicott (2005) would put it. Emotions are part of Pepys’s sense of self—they are a cohesive rather than a disruptive force.

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The way Pepys frames his feelings differs from the way his contemporary Josselin (1976) writes about his emotional life: Pepys does not judge himself for mourning the death of his mother, nor does he seem to think that God could judge him. He closes the passage with the hope that God will “have mercy” on the soul of his mother. Formulaic as the phrase may be, it nevertheless demonstrates that mourning over a loved one is not an impediment to Pepys’s religious faith. Curiously, Pepys’s affective relationships do not seem to be limited to his family or friends, but he also seems to become emotionally attached to material objects. To illustrate my point, I would like to come back to a passage that Stuart Sherman analyses from a slightly different angle, an entry stemming from March 1665  in which Pepys records with a great sense of delight how he purchased a pocket watch: “received my Wach from the watch-maker; and a very fine [one] it is—given me by Briggs the Scrivener” (Diary 6: 101). Pepys comes back to the topic of the watch a short while later when he writes, “taking pleasure to walk with my minute wach in my hand, by which I am now come to see the distances of my way from Woolwich to Greenwich” (Diary 6: 221–2). Here, Pepys expresses his “pleasure” about the practical function and precision of the pocket watch. It enables him to measure the exact time he needs for his “commute” (Sherman 1996: 79), providing “an instrument for self-reckoning, for quantitative study of the self’s motions through space and time” (ibid.). The Diary is also one of the objects for self-reckoning. As Sherman asserts, Pepys has incorporated the “three chief features Pepys values in the timepiece—its precise calibration, its privacy, and its consequent capacity to produce new data of the self” (ibid.: 91) in the narrative format of the journal. According to Sherman, there is thus a promise of ownership in the Diary, the promise of “owning time” (ibid.: 21): in Pepys’s particular use of the watch, the calibration and sense of privacy converge, so that the minute hand gauges both its owner’s comportment with a common measure of time (the quarter hour) and the range of his idiosynchratic deviation from that conventional span. In the diary, similarly, the date identifies the measure common to all who operate under England’s Old Style calendar; the narrative data, the particulars of movement through the day, belong to Pepys alone. (ibid.: 92)

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Sherman thus concludes that timepieces and diurnal prose fiction became intertwined with “promises of autonomy, self-empowerment and liberation” (ibid.: 21). However, Sherman’s analysis sets aside a detail that I find similarly crucial here: Pepys’s apparent enthusiasm about the chronometer as material object. Like Marie Condo centuries later, Pepys seems to believe that objects can actually bring happiness and that things are not merely cold and empty but somehow endowed with a great deal of emotional significance even if they do not themselves have emotions. The diarist’s pleasure does not (or not exclusively) arise from the fact that he “owns time”, as Sherman puts it, but also simply from having fashionable gadgets. Sherman’s emphasis on privacy might potentially deflect attention from the way the watch, the journal, clothes, and many other material objects inform Pepys’s emotional life but, of course, also his social life. The social quality of things is conveyed in the various passages in which the diarist, who was a tailor’s son, records how he purchases clothes, such as a “silk suit” which he buys on 5 June 1665 in celebration of the English “victory over the Dutch” (1979: 110). He describes the colours, textures, and cuts of his clothes in great detail, noting with a sense of joy how he dresses up for special occasions: [29 November 1663] Lords’ Day. This morning I put on my best black cloth trimmed with scarlett ribbon, very neat, with my cloak lined with velvet and a new beaver, which altogether is very noble, with my black silk knit canons I bought a month ago. (Diary 4: 400)

This entry suggests that Pepys is very conscious of his public “image” and that clothes are also a way of performing identity. On another level, clothes and the performance of dressing well are also cathected with libidinal affect: Pepys loves his new clothes and their colours and textures. As a boy, he would deliver his father’s products to London’s gentry; it is easy to imagine how marvellous it must have been to find oneself at the other end of the exchange. The material objects are thus not only powerful status symbols, projecting a positive public image, but they also have a more personal meaning for the diarist, reminding him of the journey he has made from his lower-middle-class origins to the elite circles of the Restoration era.

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In the following entry, Pepys writes about a sociable afternoon in the company of John Evelyn, in which the two men appear to bond over their enthusiasm for curious objects and things: [5 November 1665] [B]y water to Deptford, and there made a visit to Mr. Evelings, who, among other things, showed me most excellent painting in little, […], Indian incke, water colours, graveing; […] He read me part of a play or two of his making, very good, but not as he conceits them I think, to me. He showed me his Hortus Hyemalis; leaves laid up in a book of several plants, kept dry, which preserve colour however, and look very finely, better than any herbal. In fine, a most excellent person he is, and must be allowed a little for a little conceitedness: but he may well be so, being a man so much above others. He read me, though with too much gusto, some little poems of his own. (Diary 5: 289–90; my emphasis)

Pepys portrays his fellow diarist Evelyn with a characteristic blend of distance and identification. Evelyn is presented as acting like the curator of a museum, showing Pepys engravings, paintings, and plants, all of which Pepys gazed upon with interest and curiosity. Pepys characterises Evelyn as “a most excellent person” if a bit “conceited”, a condescending comment that the diarist hastens to qualify calling Evelyn “a man so much above others”. Pepys observes his friend closely—as closely as he observes the plants, paintings, and engravings—and he listens closely to Evelyn’s reciting poetry and plays of his own composition. There is a moment of what Freud would probably call Schaulust, that is, a sense of enjoyment gained from looking. However, this social theatre of showing and watching is neither marked by a “tormenting and burning desire to see”, as in Freud’s analyses of Schaulust (Freud 1996, 2001/1905: 109), nor is the scene pervaded by “shame” as Lacan argues in his theory of the scopic drive (1998: 194). The two men share an interest in things and art—thus, in objects in the wider sense—over which they form their homosocial bond. The bonds Pepys forms with men are obviously very different from his relationships to women, most of whom are mere “objects” for him in the pejorative sense of the lexeme. I would agree with Claire Tomalin that there are actually only two women who are exceptions to the rule (2002: 269–72): his wife Elizabeth and his servant Deborah Willet, only called “Deb” in the Diary, with whom he has a comparatively long affair in the second half of the year 1668. His dalliance with Deb is probably the only

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one that causes him remorse with respect to both women. As Tomalin notes, “[t]here is no comedy in his account but tenderness and a great deal of pain” (2002: 269). Deborah Willet’s parents had died young, and she was sent to the Pepys household by her aunt (ibid.). A girl of 17, she was the youngest servant in the household, and half Pepys’s age, who was then 34 (ibid.). Deb’s perspective is missing from Pepys’s account, except for a phrase in which Pepys acknowledges that she was “troubled” by his groping (Diary 8: 247). Elizabeth, however, features powerfully in these passages. She finds out about the affair, which is going on right under her nose, in October 1668, and is in a frenzy. Her initial reaction is to tell him she is a “Roman Catholique” (Diary 8: 337) in secret, maybe because it is the most offensive thing she can think of, and this actually “trouble[s]” Pepys (ibid.). He resolves to send Deb away to restore peace at home, although “it [is] much against [his] mind” (ibid.: 344). Again, I would agree with Tomalin that Deb has acquired some emotional relevance for him, unlike the women he abuses in his office (2002: 270–1). On 1 November 1668, he admits that “it will be best for me to let her go—but I shall love and pity her” (Diary 8: 344). The entries in which Pepys records his guilty conscience are some of the few which are remotely reminiscent of the writings of his Calvinist predecessors. Like John Bunyan’s (1962) narrator-persona in Grace Abounding, Pepys repetitively sins, repents, and sins again. This is, however, only a question of narrative surface structure, not of substance. While Bunyan is tormented by his guilty conscience, Pepys is tormented by his conflicting affection for both women. In this vein, Pepys does not view his “sins” through a religious lens, but in terms of his relationship to Deb and Elizabeth. His is a problem of object relations, not of a conflict with an ego-ideal; he does not have a guilty conscience because he flouts a given norm, but because he jettisons the relationships that matter to him emotionally: [o]nly one of the love affairs recorded in the Diary is painted with the true colours of romance and tragedy, perhaps because it was also the only one found out by Elizabeth. After her discovery Pepys’s narrative takes on a desperate intensity as he struggles with his conflicting emotions, guilt towards both women, remorse and obsessive desire. (Tomalin 2002: 269)

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He is indeed torn between feelings for both Deb and Elizabeth, maybe “prefigur[ing] the great adulteresses of nineteenth-century fiction, alternating between ecstasy and torment like Bovary and enduring punishment inflicted by an angry and virtuous spouse, like Karenina” (ibid.). The parallels that his biographer draws may be excessive, since adultery was not normatively sanctioned in men. And yet, Pepys does not record nor does he imply that he feels entitled to have an affair with his servant. On the contrary, he is acutely aware that he has wronged both women. He does not even show resistance when his wife “strike[s]” him and “pulls” his “hair”: [20 November 1668] This morning up, with mighty kind words between my poor wife and I and so to Whitehall by water, W. Hewer [Pepys’s clerk and friend] with me, who is to go with me everywhere […] for she doth plainly declare that she dares not trust me out alone […] But when I came home, hoping for a further degree of piece and quiet, I find my wife upon her bed in a horrible rage afresh, calling me all the bitter names; and […] could not refrain to strike me and pull my hair; which I resolved to bear with and had good reason to bear it. […] at last Mr Hewer came in and […] they spoke together; and at last it came to this, that I would call Deb ‘whore’ under my hand, and write to her that I hated her and would never see her more, […] which I did agree to; only, as to the name of ‘whore’ I would have excused, and therefore wrote to her sparing the word; which my wife thereupon tore it, and would not be satisfied till, Mr. Hewer winking upon me, I did write so, with the name of the whore […]. This pleased my wife, and she gives it W. Hewer to carry to her, with a sharp message from her. (Diary 9: 368–70)

The entry confirms the importance of Elizabeth Pepys in the Diary. In a certain way, it is illustrative of a Bakhtinian “heteroglossia” (1996), that is, competing, shifting voices that potentially threaten to undermine the authoritative voice of the narrator (see Nandi 2010). Even though the events are, of course, filtered through Pepys’s eyes, the liveliness and the readability of the passage (and indeed, of much of the Diary as a whole) derive from the tremendous presence of Elizabeth Pepys. Women had a low status in the political philosophy of Restoration England, but Elizabeth Pepys has a voice in her husband’s Diary. Therefore, Pepys’s Diary documents a life marked by social and affective relationships, in which women and servants had a certain amount of agency. Although the activity of writing his journal was solitary, the Diary

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itself is populated by a huge cast of characters. Pepys may picture himself as a businessman, as the proprietor of fancy material objects, as a conqueror of women. At the same time, however, his success depends on social connections, and women are not always empty signs; indeed, some have their own voice and agency.

Summary As a text which tells of social climbing and the makings of a career, of adultery and marital conflict, of strong emotions and catastrophe, the Diary resonates strongly with the contemporary reader. This chapter identified some crucial moments in which Pepys indeed innovates the diurnal form as a way of mirroring (in the Lacanian sense) and projecting an emergent modern bourgeois selfhood. On a verbal level, Pepys’s use of hyperbole and images of excess similarly lends itself to Lacanian readings. However, the Diary can also be read to confirm the tenacity of earlier intersubjective notions of the self, as it is populated by family, kinsfolk, and friends, and relates social events in vivid detail. The Diary combines several models of writing the self that were available at the time. Pepys draws on pious models of diurnal self-accounting, dating his entries and monitoring his economic successes. Like his unlikely contemporary Ralph Josselin, Pepys uses the diary to record his inner life as much as his social relationships. Crucially, however, the Diary is no longer entangled in rigid notions of piety. As a consequence, the Diary is a transitional object in more than one way. It records the transitions that were taking place in Restoration London as a bourgeois society gradually began to establish itself; however, it is also itself transitional as it navigates between community-oriented models of selfhood and fictions of autonomy and omnipotence. The Diary includes autonomy and relationality, playfulness and documentary realism, ironic distance and emotional intensity in its repertoire. It is not the teleological endpoint of a development towards bourgeois subjectivity, which dispenses with all earlier models but blends and juxtaposes various subject positions and ways of writing.

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References Allen, Brooke (2003) “The Irrepressible Pepys.” The New Criterion. Jan.: 14–22. Barker, Francis (1984) The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection. London: Methuen. Berger, Harry (1998) “The Pepys Show: Ghost-Writing and Documentary Desire in The Diary.” ELH 65: 557–91. Bunyan, John (1962) Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners [1666]. Ed. Roger Sharrock. Oxford: Clarendon. Eibach, Joachim (2011) “Das offene Haus: kommunikative Praxis im sozialen Nahraum der frühen Neuzeit.” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 38: 621–64. Freud, Sigmund (2001/1905) “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.” The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 7. Trans. James Strachey. London: Vintage. 125–231. ———. (1996) Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie. Frankfurt: Fischer. Freud, Sigmund und Joseph Breuer (1996) Studien über Hysterie [1895]. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer. Gibson, James Ed. (1957) John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys: Selections from the Diaries. London: Chatto and Windus. Glaser, Brigitte (2001) The Creation of the Self in Autobiographical Forms of Writing in Seventeenth-Century England: Subjectivity and Self-Fashioning in Memoirs, Diaries, and Letters. Heidelberg: Winter. Heyl, Christoph (2004) A Passion for Privacy. Untersuchungen zur bürgerlichen Privatsphäre in London 1660–1800. München: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag. Hill, Christopher (1967) Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England. New York: Schocken Books. ———. (1985) “Samuel Pepys (1633–1703).” The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill. Volume One: Writing and Revolution in the 17th Century. Brighton: Harvester Press. 259–74. Jancke, Gabriele (2005) “Bettgeschichten: Gastfreundschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit.” Querelles 17. http://www.querelles-­net.de/index.php/qn/article/ view/390/398 (accessed 16 January 2020). Josselin, Ralph (1976) The Diary of Ralph Josselin: 1616–1683. Ed. Alan Macfarlane London: Oxford University Press. Kohlmann, Benjamin (2010) “‘Men of Sobriety and Buisnes’: Pepys, Privacy, and Public Duty.” Review of English Studies 61.251: 535–71. Kunin, Aaron (2004) “Other Hands in Pepys’s Diary.” Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History 65.2: 195–219.

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Lacan, Jacques (1998) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI. Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jean-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton. ———. (2001/1977) Ecrits: A Selection. Ed. and trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Routledge Classics. Latham, Robert (1984) “Pepys and His Editors.” University of Leeds Review 27. 121–136. ———. (1979) “Introduction.” The Illustrated Pepys. Ed. Robert Latham. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 7–12. Latham, Robert, and William Mathews (2000) “Introduction.” The Diary of Samuel Pepys [1971]. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ix–cxxxxiii. Payne, Deborah C. (2015) “Theatrical Spectatorship in Pepys’s Diary.” Review of English Studies 66.273: 87–105. Nandi, Miriam (2010) “Writing Selves: Early Modern Diaries and the Genesis of the Novel.” Narrative Developments from Chaucer to Defoe. Eds. Gerd Bayer and Ebbe Klitgard. New York: Routledge. 60–78. Pearlman, E. (1983) “Pepys and Lady Castlemaine.” Restoration: Studies in English Literature 1660–1700 7:2. 43–53. Pepys, Samuel (1979) The Illustrated Pepys. Ed. Robert Latham. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. (1971–1983) The Diary of Samuel Pepys. 11 vols. Ed and Intro. Robert Latham and William Matthews. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1993) Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sherman, Stuart P. (1996) Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Shelton, Thomas (1642) A Tutor to Tachygraphy. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Thomaselli, Sylvana (1985) “Review: Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body.” History of Political Thought 6:3. 669–673. Tilmouth, Christopher (2007) Passion’s Triumph over Reason: A History of the Moral Imagination from Spenser to Rochester. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tomalin, Claire (2002) Samuel Pepys. The Unequalled Self. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Turner, James (1995) “Pepys and the Private Parts of Monarchy.” Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration. Literature, Drama, History. Ed. Gerald MacLean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 95–110. Von Greyerz, Kaspar (1994) “Spuren eines vormodernen Individualismus in englischen Selbstzeugnissen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts.” Winfried Schulze. Ego-Dokumente. Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte. Zürich: Akademie Verlag. 131–148. Winnicott, Donald (2005) Playing and Reality [1978]. Routledge Classics. London/New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 8

Coda

This study was guided by the idea that the early modern diary wavers between being a textual form and a cultural practice. It highlighted the key generic characteristics of the diary and illustrated that the diary’s formal make-up was derived from secular practices of accounting and Reformist guides to practical theology. These pious intertexts resonate particularly with the diary of Margaret Hoby, which was discussed in Chap. 4. Hoby writes about her daily duties, her prayers, and her everyday chores in a very reduced form without much narrative elaboration, creating a repetitive pattern that resembles a list or a litany, which is only broken through short moments of self-doubt and religious anxiety. For Hoby, keeping a record of her duties—both pious and secular—was a crucial component in her faith. Pious diaries such as Hoby’s illustrate that the practice of writing a life as it passes was meaningful in early modern culture. It offered structure and routine, the reassuring sense of belonging to a group, and the possibility to reflect upon inner feelings, if in a very narrowly circumscribed context. The enumerative form that characterises Hoby’s diary is also present in more secular variants of the genre, as demonstrated in the discussion of Anne Clifford’s (2003) diaries and autobiographical narratives in Chap. 5. A woman of rank and standing, Clifford did not (or did not have to) limit herself to writing exclusively about fulfilling her religious duties, nor does she limit herself to the diurnal pattern. However, she did use the diurnal form in at least two phases of her life: as a young married woman in 1616, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Nandi, Reading the Early Modern English Diary, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42327-8_8

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1617, and 1619, and in the last years of her life. Furthermore, her memoir “The Life of Me” and her yearly chronicles (1650–1675) retain the habit of announcing the date of a specific event, and they do not attempt to avoid thematic or verbal repetition. It would be a misreading to interpret Clifford’s use of repetition as the distracted musing of an old lady or as a lack of authorial accomplishment. Clifford’s narratives are repetitive for very strategic reasons: she notes each Northern castle she visits and each dynastic connection she forges, and makes sure to document the exact time on which the visit took place to show that the estates are securely hers (Matchinske 2009). Furthermore, she fuses a variety of linguistic registers—the factual, the mythical, and the emotive—into a blend that still resonates centuries later. The diary of the Essex clergyman Ralph Josselin (1976), which was discussed in Chap. 6, echoes the Calvinist ideology of self-monitoring and thus has many structural and thematic affinities with Margaret Hoby’s journal. Yet, it is far more varied in its content and more detailed and elaborate with respect to his emotional life. Furthermore, the context in which the two pious diarists mention inner feelings differs considerably: while Hoby only and exclusively uses an emotional language in situations in which she fears that she has committed a “sinne”, Josselin writes about his emotions in a variety of contexts. He notes gratitude for a good harvest, anger with his son when the latter flouts his expectations, fear for the life of his children when they get ill, and sorrow when they die. Josselin’s emotional frankness is very resonant and creates the impression that the diarist can draw on an emergent discourse of individualism, as his late editor Alan MacFarlane asserts. However, such affective uses of the diary were precarious for the Reformist Josselin, who “knew” that excessive emotions—for instance, mourning too intensely for his dead children— might very well provoke God’s wrath and lead to ever more severe punishments. Thus, the fact that Josselin writes about his inner feelings creates a sense of “familiarity” or “modernity” of the diary. Yet the way the diarist interprets and frames his emotions is historically distant and alien. What is more, the presence of other people—his wife, children, kinfolk, friends, and neighbours—in Josselin’s diary shows that social relationships and community matter greatly to him. I am therefore hesitant to read his diary in terms of individualism or bourgeois subjectivity, although there may be elements of both in his diary. Rather, I would set the text in a continuum between relationality and individualism.

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In the Diary of Samuel Pepys (1971–1983), which was discussed in Chap. 7, different traditions converge in one text. While the Diary is typically read as either anticipating a specific eighteenth-century bourgeois subjectivity (Sherman 1996) or bearing the traces of guilty Puritan concerns (Barker 1984), I suggested a third reading strategy. The Diary features all three functions of diary-writing identified in this study—self-scrutiny, mirroring, and relationality. Pepys combines various uses and practices of diary-writing rather than innovating the genre tout court. Like his Calvinist predecessors, Pepys writes about his daily duties and his schedule, and he appears to enjoy keeping his accounts (and the Diary itself) on a regular basis and as neat as possible. There is indeed a streak of “Puritanism” in the Diary; however, it is not Pepys’s alleged “guilt” (Barker 1984: 9) which connects him with writers like Margaret Hoby and Ralph Josselin, but its form, that is, the date on the page, the attempt to record a life as it passes, and themes such as parsimony and hard work. Clearly, however, the Diary also shares characteristics with more worldly diaries such as that of Lady Anne Clifford, as it mirrors the writer’s rise to the centres of power and documents his social rank and standing. Pepys’s Diary contains a variety of subject positions available in the Restoration era. In the Diary, “Puritan” thrift is juxtaposed with narratives of sexual libertinage and social events with depictions of domesticity; the clutter of everyday fills the pages of the diary as do large-scale catastrophes such as the Great Fire. Pepys writes with attention to detail, also emotional detail, but he also steps back and pictures himself as an ironic spectator. Pepys’s diurnal self is split in its self-reflexive gaze; he is aware of the prevalent ideology of the society he lives in, but he knows that he can ignore it time and again. The diarist’s self-distancing gaze points to the privileged subject position of the male urban elite. Similarly, his unabashed emotional frankness has a lot to do with his social rank and comparatively little with individual temperament. It is no coincidence that the Diary is the most varied of all the diaries explored in this study. A rural clergyman such as Josselin inhabited a world in which soul-searching and emotive self-expression were sanctioned by religious ideology, but sexual transgression clearly was not. Margaret Hoby, a woman writing decades earlier, had even less leeway for self-expression, and her dry tone and repetitive structure need to be read in connection with the multiple constraints faced by early modern women diarists. Anne Clifford, a woman belonging to the highest ranks of her time, could use the genre more exhaustively than Hoby, but she

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nevertheless had to craft her self-images very carefully. Gender circumscribed the way diarists wrote their lives, as did class and the divide between rural and urban areas. The versatility and variety of Pepys’s Diary hinge upon its urban setting, the diarists’ male gender, and his growing affluence and power. Pepys’s status as the most articulate diarist of his day should not be solely credited to his individual “genius” but considered, in part, the result of his social status and urban environment. As the diary shifts from dry list to more affectively coloured narrative, from a restrictive practice to a form which articulates agency, the early modern subject may also have shifted shift towards a more interiorised subjectivity. However, these transitions do not dispense with each other in a progressivist movement. Instead, they are “contained” (in the Winnicottian rather than the Greenblattian sense) in the cultural repertoire of early modern England. Already in Hoby, we can witness the fleeting presence of “objects”, of other persons, habits, and practices that matter to the diarist emotionally, and even in Pepys’s Diary, the restrictive function of the practice does not wane. Diaries, like Winnicott’s “transitional phenomena”, transgress dichotomies, as they vacillate between reality and fantasy, between restricting and enabling agency, between fostering obedience and creating dissent. Diaries widen out to self-expression and creativity, as well as to self-deception and lies. They can contain plans that are never realised, assumptions and conjecture, but also very acute observations. Late-seventeenth-century diaries are often shaped by religious anxiety and shame, but they also focus on idle amusement. Diaries document, accompany, and shape the emergence of an interiorised, affective subjectivity, but they also pull the subject closer into the power matrices of religion, state, and rank.

The Diary and the Early Modern Subject My book emerged out of a dialogue with psychoanalytic approaches to early modern culture, and I would like to conclude my analyses by pointing to some implications of my study for the continuing debate on the early modern subject. Cynthia Marshall’s Shattering the Self (2002) and her earlier readings of Shakespeare’s Roman plays (1996) provide an interesting starting point. Early modern diaries construct subjectivities that are constantly in process; they are “unfinished” and maybe even “clumsy” (Marshall 1996: 111). Like Shakespeare’s Roman heroes, they gain “complexity and even interiority” from what they “lack” (1996: 96–7).

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However, and here the parallel ends, diary narratives do not lend themselves to what Marshall has termed “self-shattering” (2002). Pious diarists may be humbled by their guilt and restricted by their faith; they may see themselves as defective and depraved, but their religious identity is characteristically robust. Even a diarist like Nehemiah Wallington, a Calvinist artisan so plagued by self-doubt that he pondered suicide (see Booy 2007: 2), constantly finds solace in his belief and, thus, restructures and remakes his narrative identity in the very moment he finds it shattered. Therefore, I propose a model of early modern subjectivity that navigates between self-shattering (Marshall 2002) and self-fashioning (Greenblatt 1980). Read against the backdrop of diary discourses, the early modern self is ambivalently constructed and annihilated, shamed and regenerated, lost and found in the repetitive practice of keeping a journal. In the process, emotions (both negative and positive) play an important and meaningful part: the dissenting diarist is plagued by guilt and regenerated by gratitude; a woman writer gains authority and voice through her affective connection with her kin; and a social climber enthusiastically documents his income, shopping habits, and sexual exploits. Emotions have the potential to disrupt the early modern subject to the point of near annihilation—one need only think of Josselin’s religious anxiety; yet, they may also work as cohesive forces, endowing the subject with identity and meaning. Conversely, diary discourses prompt a historical specification of psychoanalytic theories of the subject, as they illustrate the power structures in which the early modern subject is entangled. While keeping a diary carries the potential to create individual agency, the practice also works towards fostering obedience and consent among religious communities. Diaries ambivalently offer space for dissent, but they are also highly ideologised and narrowly circumscribed. Finally, the early modern diary sheds light on the subject as inflected by gender. The very existence of early modern women diaries prompts the interpretation that the silence of early modern women may have been overrated (see also Seelig 2006: 9). Women diarists actively participated in manuscript culture and thus put themselves into the position of a speaking subject. Yet, early modern diaries by women also illustrate that women writers struggled to find a fine balance between boldness and caution. The two women writers in my corpus each claim their voice in their own way. Paradoxically as it may seem with historical hindsight, Margaret Hoby attains voice through her dutifulness and passive receptivity. It is

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likely that this humility and passivity tended to be gendered feminine (2001: 73); I would venture that Hoby constructs her narrative identity along gender-neutral lines. The overarching theme of her diary, that is, her religious and secular duties, overlaps largely with that of pious male diarists such as Ralph Josselin, Nehemiah Wallington, or Richard Rogers. The question that propels the narrative forward—“Am I elect or reprobate?”—is identical to the question raised by male dissenters. Although her everyday life was, of course, largely structured by gender roles, the thematic focus of her diary was not. Lady Anne Clifford’s journals follow a very different rationale. She inserts herself into a subject position that is androgynous rather than gender neutral, as she fuses characteristics coded as male—power, authority, ownership—with aspects coded as female—relationality, intimacy, domesticity. Instead of eclipsing gender, Clifford exploits gendered subject positions to a strategic end. She constructs herself as a powerful matriarch and situates herself in a dynastic line of other female bearers of power. Yet, at the same time, she invokes a vocabulary of intimacy, domesticity, and relationality. Thus, she draws strength from her proximity to other powerful women, but she is also very much aware that her claims are contested. Both women diarists flout gendered expectations associated with the diary. For Clifford and Hoby, keeping a diary was anything but “casual”, “leisured”, or “soft” (Didier 1976 qtd. in Lejeune 2009: 150), and hence not an activity that was gendered “feminine” (ibid.). Journal writing was carried out diligently and endowed with meaning. In the case of Clifford, it was informed by political and legal interests and thus the opposite of “casual”. This does not entail, however, that gender did not inform the way women kept their diary in the early modern period. The sparseness of Hoby’s narrative, the careful crafting of Anne Clifford’s texts, and the hesitancy to write about feelings, which was broken only in very specific circumstances, illustrate the extent to which early modern women were controlled by patriarchal codes of conduct. While there already existed a cultural stereotype that marked women as the emotional sex, it did not encourage emotional self-expression in women. On the contrary, it may have exacerbated self-conscious restraint in the woman diarist.

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Future Directions My study explored the possibilities and limitations for self-expression the diary as a genre held in the early modern world. Another possible focus would be the role of space, and in particular, the role of colonialism in the genesis of the diary. Some of the continuities between the diurnal form and colonial narratives have been identified with respect to Defoe’s Crusoe, a novel that incorporates a fictionalised journal (de Certeau 1984: 154–164; see also Sherman 1996: 228–235). It would be interesting to analyse if and how extant British naval journals and travel diaries act as “temporal correlatives” (Sherman 1996: 231) to the spatial conquest of the Global South. From a twenty-first-century perspective, the diary’s transitions in the digital age are still to be tackled. Are our Lockdown Diaries an attempt to reach out to an imaginary addressee, to forge community in a time of social distancing, and maybe a means to modulate feelings of helplessness and anxiety? Clearly, practices of itemising, managing, and self-­examination have already reappeared with a vengeance in digital culture, even before the pandemic, as apps “allow us” to stick to an ever more intense schedule, to supervise our daily intake in calories, and measure the steps we take towards becoming a good neoliberal subject. And, yet, being thus supervised by a “smart” machine is weirdly, maybe perversely, enjoyable. With the prominence of social media such as Instagram and Facebook, self-mirroring has become another type of pandemic. Social networking services exploit the subject’s desire for creating a fiction of the self and for emotive self-expression. Curiously echoing diary discourse of centuries past, digital culture gives us the possibility to express emotions and narrate a life, but it also synchronises affect (see Van Dijk 2007: 59–60), matching the feelings and experiences of an individual with that of a larger community. Facebook has created a system of surveillance and control which we (perversely?) enjoy and does away with the separation of the private and the public. Maybe the undoing of the private sphere is relatively unopposed because the separation has never been very stable in the first place. Morphed into the Facebook account or the fitness app, the practice of diary-keeping has again become a matter of public performance rather than secrecy. Digital diaries may at times “offer space and time protected from the pressures of life” (Lejeune 2009: 195), but they also gesture in the opposite direction.

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References Barker, Francis (1984) The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection. London: Methuen. Booy, David, ed. (2007) The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, 1618–1654: A Selection. Aldershot: Ashgate. Certeau de, Michel (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Clifford, Lady Anne (2003) The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford [1616–1619]. Ed. D. J. H. Clifford. Gloucestershire: History. Didier, Béatrice (1976) Le journal intime. Paris: PU de France. Greenblatt, Stephen (1980) Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Hoby, Margaret (2001) The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599–1605. Ed. Joanna Moody. Stroud: Sutton. Josselin, Ralph (1976) The Diary of Ralph Josselin: 1616–1683. Ed. Alan Macfarlane. London: Oxford University Press. Lejeune, Philippe (2009) On Diary. Ed. Jeremy E.  Pomkin and Julie Rak. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. Marshall, Cynthia (1996) “Wound-man: Coriolanus, Gender, and the Theatrical Construction of Identity.” Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects. Ed. Valerie Traub, Lindsay Kaplan and Dympna Callaghan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 93–118. ——— (2002) The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Matchinske, Megan (2009) “Serial Identity: History, Gender and Form in the Diary Writing of Lady Anne Clifford.” Anne Clifford and Lucy Hutchinson. Ed. Mihoko Suzuki. Surrey: Ashgate. 203–18. Pepys, Samuel (1971–1983) The Diary of Samuel Pepys. 11 vols. Ed and Intro. Robert Latham and William Matthews. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sherman, Stuart P. (1996) Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Seelig, Sharon Cadman (2006) Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women’s Lives, 1600–1680. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Dijk, José (2007) Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Index

A Ariès, Phillippe, 101, 150 Augustine, St. J., 36 Authorship, female, see Gender Autobiographical pact, 24 Autobiography, genre, 2, 3, 25, 141 B Barker, Francis, 6, 10, 12, 82, 97, 162, 164, 165, 169, 189 Beadle, John, 40, 41, 141 Bedford, Ronald, 2, 10, 29, 38, 59, 108, 119, 138–140, 149, 158 Belsey, Catherine, 6, 35, 36 Benstock, Shari, 4 Blodgett, Harriet, 3, 19 Bremer, Francis, 39, 45, 49, 58 Brennan, Teresa, 66, 71, 72 Bunkers, Suzanne, 3 Bunyan, John, 91, 182

C Calvin, John, 10, 36, 44, 45, 47, 50–52, 98 Charles I, 163 Charles II, 161, 163 Children, see Parent-child relationships Civil War, effects of, 145 Clocks and watches, 21, 37, 38, 100, 113, 114, 179 D Davis, Lloyd, 138, 149, 158 Descartes, René, 92 Devereux, Walter, first Earl of Essex, 83, 84 Diaries and journals, terminology and gender, 81, 190, 192 metadiscourses, 4, 10, 36 and time, 1, 87, 91, 193 Dohrn-van Rossum, Gerhard, 37, 38

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Nandi, Reading the Early Modern English Diary, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42327-8

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196 

INDEX

E Eakin, John, 61 Ekman, Paul, 68–71 Elizabeth I, 83, 110, 125 Emotions and affect, 1, 42, 68, 71, 72, 158, 193 early modern concepts of, 41–44 and feelings, 64, 70–72, 99, 153, 193 and psychoanalysis, 72 Erasmus, Desiderius, 41, 43 F Freud, Sigmund, 8, 36, 43, 44, 47–50, 56, 57, 60, 63–66, 97, 147, 168, 181 G Gender, 3, 4, 19, 21, 58, 81, 103, 112, 115, 132, 133, 171, 190–192 Grabes, Herbert, 52, 54 Green, André, 57 Greenblatt, Stephen, 6, 11, 25, 35, 191 Greenham, Richard, 45, 46, 86, 95 H Hoby, Lady Margaret, 4, 5, 9–11, 23, 29, 45, 54, 81–103, 113, 132, 137, 187–192 Hoby, Sir Thomas, 84, 86, 89, 90 Hospitality, 120, 166 Huff, Cynthia, 3 J James I, 110, 111, 114, 130, 131 Jancke, Gabriele, 62, 63, 120, 166 Jarzebowski, Claudia, 151, 154

Josselin, Jane, 139, 150, 152, 154 Josselin, Mary, 150–157 Josselin, Ralph, 5, 6, 9–12, 18, 24, 46, 97, 137–159, 179, 184, 188, 189, 191, 192 Jouissance, 50, 51, 67, 99, 100, 103, 149, 150, 168, 170 Journal, see Diaries and journals, terminology K Kelly, Phillippa, 52, 54, 55, 138, 149, 158 Klein, Melanie, 56–58, 60 L Lacan, Jacques, 35, 50–55, 57, 59, 60, 63, 99, 117, 149, 162, 171–174, 181 Lejeune, Phillippe, 1–3, 8, 17, 20, 24, 25, 27, 29, 65, 66, 124, 192, 193 Luther, Martin, 43, 44 M Marshall, Cynthia, 7, 30, 52, 190, 191 Mascuch, Michael, 3, 10 Maus, Katherine Eisaman, 6, 95, 96, 147 Mauss, Marcel, 62 Melchior-Bonnet, Sabine, 52, 54, 55 Mendelson, Sara, 30, 41, 90 Milton, John, 61, 138, 154, 163 Mirrors, 8, 9, 11, 38, 52–59, 61, 91, 113–123, 126, 132, 162, 168, 171, 174, 178, 189 Mirror stage, 52–54, 60, 117, 171, 174

 INDEX 

N Nussbaum, Felicity, 3, 20, 28 O Object relations theory, 10, 56–58, 124, 153 P Parent-child relationships, 8, 48, 53, 56, 57, 60, 61, 64, 65, 69, 87, 94, 98, 99, 102, 110, 111, 116, 118, 119, 122, 123, 125, 129–131, 137–141, 150–154, 156, 157, 159, 161, 163, 164, 169, 172, 188 Pepys, Elizabeth, 175–184 Pepys, Samuel, 9, 10, 12, 23, 37, 52, 55, 62, 72, 97, 139, 161–184, 189, 190 Perkins, William, 10, 38, 40, 44–46, 51, 52, 86–89, 95–97 Pirnie, Karen Worley, 109, 115 Pye, Christopher, 6, 7 R Recusancy, 42, 83, 84 Rogers, Richard, 10, 38, 39, 45, 46, 49, 54, 86, 192 S Sackville, Richard, Earl of Dorset, 110, 111, 115, 122 Sackville-West, Vita, 111

197

Seelig, Sharon, 4, 6, 11, 29, 81, 82, 88, 89, 101, 109, 110, 112, 117, 123, 191 Selleck, Nancy, 62, 63 Sherman, Stuart, 4, 5, 7, 10, 21, 22, 29, 37, 38, 87, 161, 165, 166, 176, 179, 180, 189, 193 Shuger, Deborah, 30, 52, 54, 82 Sinfield, Alan, 83, 96 Skura, Meredith, 3, 6, 82 Smith, Sidonie, 3, 4, 18, 20, 23 Smyth, Adam, 3, 5, 36, 37 Spenser, Edmund, 41, 43 Stern, Tiffany, 37, 38 T Taylor, Charles, 58, 158 Tilmouth, Christopher, 6, 41, 42, 45, 46, 51, 55, 171 Time, and Reformation theology, 52 W Wallington, Nehemiah, 191, 192 Watson, Julia, 3, 4, 18, 20, 23 Winnicott, Donald, 11, 36, 55, 59–61, 63–67, 117–120, 123, 124, 132, 153, 158, 178, 190 Wright, Thomas, 42, 96 Z Žižek, Slavoj, 50–52, 155