In a panoramic history of western private life, Philippe Ariès called Renaissance England the “birthplace of privacy.” What set England apart from much of Europe was the Protestant Reformation, with its emphases on immediate engagement with scripture (an impetus to literacy) and on personal responsibility for the spiritual state (the “growth of individualism”). For Ariès, it was symptomatic that so many English men and women textualized their everyday lives in diaries and family memoirs. This seminar will look at journals, autobiographies, biographies, letters, personal advice, and legal depositions from Shakespeare’s time. Were these new genres instruments of reflection, self-expression, self-fashioning, misrepresentation—or some combination? Which conventions of literary form, religious and political thought, and economic concern shaped them? What were the uses of fiction, fantasy, and humor in personal history? How was it that accounts of spiritual self-examination and social regulation documented so much gossip, scandal, and controversy?