The Two Pilgrimages of the Laureate of Ashover, Leonard Wheatcroft

Abstract

The broad development through the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries of diaries and autobiographies, that is to say, forms of personal record of shorter and longer perspective, is well known. It is understood, for example, that the personal record developed slowly out of annals of memorable events, that the practice moved from clerics to lay persons, especially in towns, that spiritual self-recording became common during and after the religious struggles of the sixteenth century, and that there is a thin line between various kinds of accounting and self-accounting, since both can be about the use of the talents or ‘the infinite benefit of daily Examination: Comparing to a Merchant, keeping his books, to see whither he thrived …’¹ Many kinds of record attempt to clarify what happened in the past in order better to gear up for the future. But, as the present volume witnesses, there are many kinds of personal record, many more than can be comfortably assimilated to one model, and in any period more dispersed or differently figured kinds of self-recording can be found. This essay is about a remarkable and little known set of seventeenth-century documents which may serve, at the least, to make us think about the relationship of ‘private’ self-representations and ‘public’ self-presentations, and about the effects of the wide distribution through print of collections of socially useful or self-improving kinds of writing, books of ‘wit’ in verse and exemplary letters.