Introduction to The Vocacyon of Johan Bale, edited by Peter Happé and John N. King, Renaissance English Text Society, 1990, pp. 9-13.

In this excerpt, the authors provide an overview of The Vocacyon of Johan Bale, one of the first attempts at autobiographical narrative in English literary history, albeit covering only one year of Bale's life. The authors focus on the biblical allusions and polemical wrath of Bale's work.

Bale's Vocacyon represents a precursor of the spiritual autobiographies that became fashionable within Puritan circles during the seventeenth century. It offers an unusually detailed account of a turbulent year as an example of God's providential deliverance of a Protestant “saint.” Literary antecedents include the visions of Juliana of Norwich (c. 1343-c. 1413) and The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1436), the earliest autobiographical narrative extant in the English language. Unlike these illiterate medieval mystics, who had to rely upon amanuenses, Bale wrote...