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On Chronicles Being a Concise Discussion on the Manner of Recording the Days Blogging is a popular pastime in this day and age. With the advent of software able to publish one's thoughts with the press of the button, public diary-keeping has become a sort of sport. There are a vast range of such journals on the internet, from the extremely personal to the brazenly shallow, the highly political to the deeply spiritual to the rants and raves of schoolboys. We tend to think of diaries as personal, private records of events, thoughts, feelings--as the minutia of the common life. Like modern blogs, historical diaries can range from mere records of appointments to interesting descriptions of journeys, life at court, medical practice, and so on. What we think of as diaries do not appear with any sort of frequency in Western culture until the 15th century; however, in Japanese culture, the tradition is more than a thousand years old. Even if we increase the definition to include collections of correspondence and autobiography, two other genres allowing the revelation of the self, we still do not see much in the way of journals or diaries before 1400. Indeed, the Booke of Margery Kemp, believed to be the earliest surviving English autobiography, doesn't appear until the second quarter of the 15th century. While this suggests an entire line of study and inquiry regarding the sense of self and the use of language to describe it prior to the Renaissance, we are here concerned more with the details of creation and the contents of what a living person would recognize as a diary. Many of the diaries, or, as they may have been more properly called, the chronicles of British and European individuals in the 15th-17th centuries are written by men. Those chronicles that do exist regarding women are often not really diaries of the women, but rather a man's record of the events of her life. Thus, while the word "chronicle" would be the proper period descriptor, we will continue to use "diary" here. Furthermore, we will consider any diary that falls into the "Gray area" of 1601-1650 as properly a part of this discussion; most of the Early Modern diaries of this era were written by people who were either born in the 16th century, or the the children thereof. Many of the attitudes and language usages appear to carry over into this era. Period diaries are often to the point. While there are examples of entries that are quite extensive--for instance, John Forman's records of what he saw at the Globe are fairly lengthy--what we often find as a daily diary tends to consist of fairly brief entries. For instance: Friday the 25th, I did not move from here. After dinner, Cantepie went off to sleep at Val-de-Sayre, at Billon's house, in order to be at the Sessions tomorrow at Barfleur. I had the fallow plowed at Croutes among the apple trees. --From the Diary of Gilles de Gouberville, currently being transcripted and translated at http://www.livejournal.com/users/gouberville The inner life of a given individual is often expressed very succinctly, if it is expressed at all. Given that the majority of diaries available were written by men, this may simply be a function of gender; even now, beginning research on the difference between male versus female blogging habits suggests that men are more likely to journal about the world around them than the world within them. Early modern diaries written by women do tend to mention the woman's emotional life regularly, although such mentions remain brief. Furthermore, at this point in time, there is a great deal of male-authored literature on morality (i.e., Erasmus), social observation (Harrison), harangues against the opposite sex (Knox), household advice (Platt), and so on. The men who could write personal diaries were also the men writing the era's nonfiction literature. It may be that, given the limitation of their time and tools, they focused all that sort of energy into those volumes they intended to publish. And it is important to consider the limitations of their tools. Today, we have ready access to reams and reams of paper, boxes and boxes of pens and pencils, and the essentially limitless writing space of the Internet. If we so desire, we can spend three hours a day writing out our thoughts, feelings, and activities at very little cost beyond the time. This was not so in period. Paper was an expensive commodity, never mind a blank book finely bound for the explicit purpose of creating one's own diary or commonplace book. Most individuals treated paper like the precious material that it was. To keep a permanent record of one's life required more time, energy, and money than most people were able to give. One of the ways in which people conserved paper was through the use of "tables." These are writing surfaces that may be erased and reused. Individuals often wrote rough drafts of letters, things they wanted to recall, to-do lists, and other such temporary things upon tables before transferring them to a more permanent place on paper or vellum. This may account for some of the tone of the writing in period diaries. Now, to be quite clear, this next bit is theory. It's based on some knowledge of tools and a lot of reading, but it's still theory. However, most of the diaries I have, to this point, read, have the tone of something remembered. While some of that tone is probably attributable to the style of the era and the fact that diaries, ultimately, are records of memory, I believe it is also a result of the process of the writing itself. Rather than pouring one's thoughts on to the blank paper, as we do now, diarists of the early modern era had the opportunity to revise their thoughts before committing them to the paper, in large part because of the mechanics of using the tools: thought to a blank table and thence, at a later time, to paper or vellum. I have found this to be quite practical, myself. I write my entry upon my blank tables book, and later, when copying it to its final form (in this case, an internet blog), I often revise, slimming down my sentences or adding details as desired. A further interesting note about the language: often, the writing suggests that the writer is recalling a number of given days at a time. Phrases such as "upon this day, I..." are quite common. While this probably the period way of saying "Today, I did xyz," it's also a frequent mark of linear recall. Modern language differentiates more precisely: "Today, I did this. Yesterday, I went there. The day before, I went fishing." After writing it all out, some educated individuals were capable of some simple binding. While it was entirely possible to take one's collected thoughts to a professional binder, there is plenty of evidence suggesting that individuals could and did bind their own commonplace books or collected, personal works. For example, Anna Neuper appears to have bound her Modelbuch on her own; the Beinecke Library at Yale has several commonplace books bound in some fairly crude manners, suggesting that the person compiling the book bound them him/herself. However, at this point in time, blank signatures of paper and vellum could be purchased through the same stationers that would sell books and blank tables. It's possible that at least some of these signature bindings were purchased that way from the stationer. Did most diarists bind their own diaries? At this point, I can not say. However, the fact remains that educated individuals had the means to keep and bind small books of their own thoughts and interests, whether as a commonplace book, a personal chronicle, an autobiography, or a combination of all these things. What personally made early modern books that have come to us are often not so strictly defined as our era might like them to be, and that is entirely appropriate. Who alive today keeps a record of their life that is only an autobiography, or only a diary, or only a compilation of quotes? Most journalling people, even now, mix their "genres" in their personal records, and that is as it should be. Life doesn't break into categories. Selected References A Commonplace book. Beinecke Library, Yale University. http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/photoneg/oneITEM.asp?pid=39002037507366&iid=3750736&srchtype= Example of crudely bound early modern commonplace book. Boucher, E. Dame Merouda Pendray, her chronicle: An annotated
exercise in persona blogging. http://merouda.blogspot.com (diary)
and http://elysesee.blogspot.com
(research notes). Ongoing. 2005. Note: A number of links to online excerpts of early modern diaries may be found off of the diary link, above. Boucher, E. A Blank-Tables Book. http://www.merouda.com/asheraldry/as11.htm Instructions for creating and more research into blank tables. Ongoing. 2005. Handley, C. An Annotated Bibliography of Diaries Printed in English. Hanover Press:2002. An online version is at http://diarysearch.co.uk/. Machyn, Henry, The Diary of Henry Machyn, Citizen and Merchant-Taylor of London, from A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1563. ed. John Gough Nichols. London: The Camden Society, 1848. Nichols, John Gough, ed. The Chronicle of Queen Jane, and of Two Years of Queen Mary, and Especially of the Rebellion of Sir Thomas Wyat. London: The Camden Society, 1850. (excerpts from this are now online here.) Spies, Nancy. Anna Neuper's Modelbuch: Early 16th Century Patterns for Weaving Brocaded Bands. Aralate Studio. Jarrettsville, MD:(date?) Stallybrass, P., R. Chartier, J.F. Mowery, & H. Wolfe. Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England. In Shakespeare Quarterly, volume 55, issue 4, pp. 379-419. Johns Hopkins UP. Baltimore, MD:2004 Starkey, David, ed. Rivals in Power: Lives and Letters of the Great Tudor Dynasties. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990.
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