1. Pre-Modern Identities
Making History
Peter Marshall

2. 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)

3. 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

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

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

6. Individualism always there?

7. 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)

8. 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.’

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

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

11. 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’