20 research outputs found
Early Modern Self-narratives from German-speaking Areas in a Transcultural Perspective
Autobiographical texts have long been seen, from a micro-level perspective, as
evidence of the ‘individuality’ of the writer, and, from a macro-level
perspective, as evidence of the long-term historical development of European
or Western individual-oriented society. However, recent research has
undertaken to deconstruct this notion, suggesting that ‘Western’ texts are as
deeply embedded in a social world and in social-oriented perspectives as those
from other world regions. The individualised person is now recognised as just
one among many concepts of the person. This article summarises the research
that has been conducted during the past two decades on early modern
autobiographical writings, primarily from German-speaking areas of the world.
It closely examines the interplay between individual and society in one
particular autobiography, that of the Zurich professor of Old Testament
Studies Konrad Pellikan (1478–1556). Using the concept of the
‘autobiographical person’, it shows his work to be typical of the
autobiographies written by one social group—early modern scholars. By
comparing this Christian male scholar with his Jewish and Muslim colleagues,
the article aims to attain a transcultural, gendered perspective on
autobiography. In an attempt to reach some methodological and theoretical
conclusions, a set of analytical tools is proposed to distinguish between the
perspectives of authors and of later scholars, and also between (a) real
persons and their personhood, (b) ‘autobiographical persons’ and (c) cultural
concepts of ‘person’. In this way, the ‘person’ is taken into account by
scholars as an analytical category, as well as being a set of real-life
practices and conceptual notions used by actors in various social, cultural
and historical settings