The Medieval History Journal

Although the famous Mughal poet Mir Taqi Mir’s Persian text Z-ikr-i Mīr has come to enjoy considerable renown as the first autobiography penned by an Urdu poet, scholars of Mir have continued to be puzzled by the text’s contents. Its diverse sections comprise a mishmash of hagiography, historical chronicle and popular bon mots, and yield little in the way of informing us about Mir the man or Mir the poet. Even more problematical is the inclusion in the text of numerous ‘facts’ that are quite easily disprovable. Should we then consider much of Z-ikr-i Mīr to be false and fabricated? Or should we take Mir’s intention in composing the text to be something other than autobiographical? This article argues for the latter, proposing that much of what is confusing about the text is only really so because of our misplaced generic expectations from it—many of its ‘inconsistencies’ may be accounted for by freeing it from its autobiographical straitjacket and viewing it instead through the prism of a variety of alternative Persianate genres forming part of a wider, cosmopolitan, classical literary tradition. Through the focal example of Mir’s text as well as examples from a variety of Mughal, Ottoman and Arabic writings, the article underlines the importance of distinguishing between ‘autobiography’ and ‘autobiographical’, and contests notions of the existence of a distinct, recognisable and recognised genre of autobiography in the pre-modern Islamicate context.

This article investigates autobiography as an improvisatory mode of religious speech in pre-colonial South Asia, arguing (i) that autobiographical writing in early South Asia is marked by great spontaneity and invention of form in the absence of a proper literary genre; (ii) that we can discern distinctly South Asian ways of speaking autobiographically, ways that predate and differ from modern European understandings of autobiography and (iii) that autobiographical speech is used as a powerful technique for religious polemic in South Asia and appears in particular at moments of heightened religio-political competition and contestation. Along with a number of examples, two texts will be explored in greater detail: autobiographies by a seventeenth-century Jain merchant and religious reformer Banarasidas and a nineteenth-century Christian priest and convert from Islam, ‘Imad ud-din.

A lack of sources makes it difficult to discover the personhood of premodern Japanese royal women—how they viewed themselves or wanted to be viewed by others. Hachijō-in (1137–1211), a royal heiress, strove to protect her lineage, which had begun to weaken in the political and military turmoil of the late twelfth century. Through a close analysis of her prayer of dedication (kōmon), this article explores how she reflected upon herself after undergoing a time of great difficulty as an unmarried royal daughter. In contrast to the historical overviews that typically emphasise the roles of medieval male royals and warriors, this study demonstrates that royal daughters also played significant religio-political roles. They developed a strong sense of responsibility for supporting royal authority and commemorating deceased family members. Hachijō-in’s prayer reveals her objectives, feelings and values as a woman through a deliberate construction of herself in front of the Great Bodhisattva Hachiman of Iwashimizu Shrine.

From the 2nd century BC, the view emerged in China that the intent of the author is crucial to a poem’s composition and understanding. Writing was seen as the manifestation of the author’s inner spiritual nature and identity. Thus all writing was to some extent autobiographical; writing about oneself had to be indirect, rather than overt or blatant. There were a number of obstacles to the development of autobiography as a genre in China. A high value was placed on humility, and writers hesitated to focus on themselves, only rarely writing in the first person. They used different names for themselves, and unlikely literary forms, such as prefaces to works, or biographies of other people, or speaking through fictional characters. There was also resistance to autobiography, because it was thought that a life or career could only be assessed when it was over. There was still a substantial amount of autobiographical writing in ancient and medieval China. This article focuses primarily on the Tang and Song periods, and on the development of the literary form of the self-written epitaph; the earlier development of the genre and its later influence are also discussed.

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.

This article explores how the relationship of a single person and society is depicted in the twelfth century and the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries in French and German autobiographical writings. Shifting away from looking at the ‘group–single person’ relationship, which is so prominent in the debate on medieval individuality, and turning to ‘society’, the article suggests that this wider scope can offer new ways of identifying parallels and differences between modern and pre-modern concepts of the self. Drawing on sociological theory (Simmel, Luhmann) on conceptualising the self, the article argues that, with respect to self-esteem, self-consciousness and (if at all) ‘autonomy’ there are more similarities than differences between medieval and modern ways of being ‘individual’. Besides the similarities, the fundamental differences can be found in the overall perspectives and the general frameworks against which concepts of the self are developed. On the one hand, people conceptualise themselves as being part of, or rather, exponents of society. On the other hand, they describe themselves as being counterparts of, or rather, external to society. Whether this approach helps to yield a different view of how pre-modern autobiographical texts can be read, with side glances to the merchant Lucas Rem and the professor Johan vam Hirtze (both fifteenth century), the study concentrates on Guibert of Nogent, a twelfth-century abbot, and Katharina Schütz-Zell, a sixteenth-century widow of a Protestant priest.

Changing faith in early modern Europe created a significant amount of paperwork. Converts narrated their stories on numerous pages and thus (re)wrote their religious lives. Giving detailed insights into their conversion histories, their personal (re)turning to God, they created and exposed themselves in their autobiographical writings. Converts carefully composed conversion narratives to be recognized as “true believers” by their communities. Writing their spiritual autobiographies helped them to re-establish relations with both the world and themselves, which had been lost during their changes of faith. Converts not only fashioned a new self, they also became a new subject. Doing the paperwork was the final step in assuming both a new religious position and a new religious identity.

The rich biographical literature of the Arabic-speaking world has been appreciated by European scholars since the inception of academic Arabic studies in the late seventeenth century and is one of the most important sources for Arabic cultural and historical studies. Less attention has been paid to Arabic self-narratives, various types of which have existed almost from the beginnings of Arabic literature in the late eighth and early ninth centuries; the majority was produced, as one might expect, by the learned elite. Dwight Reynolds has recently shown that by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the scholarly autobiography had become a recognised genre, with particular features, which included childhood studies (or lack of them), higher studies under named teachers, academic controversies, positions held publications and self-justifications. These accounts seem to have almost always been attached to the beginning or end of some major work or sometimes appear as digressions within the main text. We also possess two free-standing memoirs by feudal lords, composed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. They are filled with personal, even intimate recollections, and they both occasionally employ an informal variety of written Arabic for greater verisimilitude. This use of ‘Middle Arabic’ and the possible reasons for it are discussed, as is the sudden proliferation of autobiographical accounts written by Arabic speakers in European languages in the first half of the nineteenth century.