SOURCE: “The vocacyon of Johan Bale and Early English Autobiography,” in Renaissance Quarterly Vol. 24, No. 3, 1971, pp. 327-40.

In this essay, Fairfield examines The vocacyon of Johan Bale as a unique example of an early autobiographical work.

Sixteenth-century Englishmen were not frequently given to self-scrutiny—at least not in writing. This was a disinclination which they shared with their medieval forbears, since autobiography was not a very common form of literary activity in the Middle Ages. Monastic self-analysis, sub specie aeternitatis and guided by the standard categories of virtues and vices—yes. Coherent study of the self, for its own sake and in all its quirks and idiosyncracies—scarcely ever.¹ In the early sixteenth century, the murmur of new ideas from Italy did begin to touch England: a sense of distance and of difference between the present and the past, and an awakened appreciation for the discrete, the singular...