Early Modern Women’s Diaries

This entry first considers the question of what may be defined as a diary in the early modern period, along with issues of the preservation, recovery, and provenance of texts. From this, it then discusses questions about generic determination, fluidity, and intertextuality in relation to diaries and journals written by a range of women in different decades of the early modern period. In surveying such matters of form, this overview entry also introduces a series of recurrent themes: the private and the public; time and temporality; the relationship between diary writing and a life lived; the spiritual and the secular; life experience; and familial, political, and religious affiliations. Questions about the gendering of these thematic concerns are interwoven into the discussion of form itself and matters of autonomy and restriction in relation to gender, women’s selfhood and relationships to others, mediation of women’s writings, women’s knowledge, and women’s time.