Pre-Modern Identities Making History Peter Marshall

Some mind-stretching questions: ▪ what is ‘identity’ in an historical context? ▪ is it something ‘essential’, or something socially and culturally ‘constructed’? ▪ is identity the same as a sense of ‘self’? ▪ when, and why, did recognisably modern identities emerge? ▪ is ‘individualism’ an (early) modern phenomenon? ▪ how have scholars addressed these questions? Identity found in ‘a productive tension between two contradictory impulses: identity as the unique individuality of a person (as in “identity-card”), or identity as a common denominator that places an individual within a group (as in “identity-politics”)’ (Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self)

Renaissance Individualism Before the Italian Renaissance, ‘Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation – only through some general category’ Jacob Burckhardt

‘Here I Stand’: Luther at the Diet of Worms

Protestant Individualism Max Weber- ‘methodological individualism’: emphasis on agency and action of individual persons in understanding of society

Individualism always there?

Renaissance Self-Fashioning The antithesis of Burckhardt’s heroic individualism: ‘the human subject itself… [seems] remarkably unfree, the ideological product of the relations of power in a particular society.’ (Stephen Greenblatt)

Individual Identities within group identities Natalie Zemon Davies: ‘virtually all the occasions for talking or writing about the self involved a relationship’ Ulinka Rublack: dress helps us to understand people’s ‘fluid, composite self-perception, marked by a balance of the desire to fit in with different groups and yet be recognised as distinctive.’

Clues from portraiture: realism and naturalism? Unknown artist, The Wilton Diptych, c. 1390 Hans Holbein, The Duke of Norfolk, 1539-40

A layered identity: Dürer’s self-portrait of 1500

Michel de Montaigne (1533-92) ‘It is a craven and servile idea to disguise ourselves and hide under a mask, and not to dare to show ourselves as we are . .. A generous heart should not belie its thoughts; it wants to reveal itself even to its inmost depths’