David Booy - Böcker

The seventeenth century saw a dramatic increase in self-writing-from the private jotting down of personal thoughts in an irregular and spontaneous way, to the carefully considered composition of extended autobiographical narrative and deliberate self-fashioning for public consumption. Recent anthologies of women's writing, drawing to some extent on this rich but relatively little-known archive, have demonstrated the importance of studying such material to gain insight into female lives in that era. Personal Disclosures is innovative in that it stimulates and facilitates comparative analysis of female and male representations of the self, and of gendered constructions of identity and experience, by presenting a broad range of extracts from both women's and men's autobiographical writings. The majority of the extracts have been freshly edited from original seventeenth-century manuscripts and books. Exploiting all kinds of text-diaries, journals, logs, testimonies, memoirs, letters, autobiographies-the anthology also encourages consideration of topics central to current scholarly interest: religious experience, the body, communities, the family, encounters with new lands and peoples, and the conceptualization and writing of the self. A General Introduction discusses early modern autobiographical writing, and there are substantial introductions to each of the six sections, together with detailed suggestions for further reading.

While writings by early modern Quaker women have been discussed and quoted fairly extensively, relatively few of their texts are readily or widely available. The chief purpose of this edition is to rectify this state of affairs in one central area - that of autobiographical writing. The edition contains substantial excerpts from a range of self-writings by Quaker women, composed between the 1650s and circa 1710: letters, testimonies, memoirs, accounts of spiritual development, narratives of persecution and imprisonment. Six of the texts have been freshly edited from manuscripts (including Mary Penington's A Brief Account); the others have been transcribed from the first printed editions. In his general introduction to the volume, the editor sketches the history of the Quaker movement from the 1650s to the early 1700s, and considers the role of female Quakers during the first and second phases of the movement. The introduction also surveys the types and purposes of autobiographical writings produced by female Friends, and relates these writings to key Quaker ideas, concerns and practices regarding the inner light, scripture, testimony, plain speaking, friendship, gender and community. Booy indicates the wider context of the development of autobiographical writing during the seventeenth century, and discusses briefly issues to do with the construction of the self in writing. Each text is prefaced by a substantial headnote providing biographical and historical information. Footnotes supply biblical and other references, and gloss unfamiliar or specialist vocabulary. The volume includes a comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary materials. The edition is aimed at all those interested in the history of the Quakers, whether they be scholars in the fields of religious, cultural and women's studies, or of history and literature generally.