notes introduction 1. See Reason of Church-Government and An Apology Against a Pamphlet (both 1642) in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 1, ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953). 2. Two of Milton’s other tracts contain explicit autobiography: Second Defence of the English People (1654) and Defence of Himself (1655). For a fuller discussion of all four tracts, see Chapter 3. 3. For detailed considerations of the way these two works employ autobiography, see Chapters 2 and 4, respectively. 4. Jesse Lander, Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). See also the discussion of the literary legacy of religious polemic in Joseph L. Black’s introductory essay in Black, ed., The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2008), esp. xxv–xxxiv, lxxiv–xciv. 5. See, for example, Irenaeus’s preface to Book 1 of Against Heresies (text available online through the Gnostic Society Library, www.gnosis.org/library/advh1.htm) or Book 26 of Epiphanius’s Panarion (Frank Williams, trans., The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis [Leiden: Brill, 2009], esp. 104–9). 6. In his Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, for example, More responds at some length to attacks made by Tyndale and his supporters—but More’s self-defenses are defenses only of the claims and methods of his previous polemics; even when his use of the first person is witty and ironic, it reveals nothing personal about More himself. See Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 8.1, ed. Louis A. Schuster et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 26–40, 177–81. For a few relevant examples from the Marprelate controversy, see Black, Martin Marprelate, 115–16, 122, 200–201. Even Martin Luther—to take a Continental example—says virtually nothing that is directly autobiographical in his major controversial works or in his debates with Erasmus, Henry VIII, and More. In The Bondage of the Will (1525), Luther actually steps back from autobiography fairly dramatically, saying, “But this is not the place to tell the story of my life or works. . . . The sort of person I am, and the spirit and purpose with which I have been 172 notes to pages 3–6 drawn into this affair, I leave to [God]” Luther’s Works, vol. 33, ed. Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972), 73. 7. As decades of scholarly debate over the theological inclinations of John Donne and George Herbert have illustrated, the compression and syntactic flexibility of lyric permits a poetic speaker to balance between theological and devotional positions, expressing an attitude or a mood rather than announcing a denominational affiliation. The category of self-vindication includes juridical examinations, such as Anne Askew’s Examinacyon (1546) and John Lilburne’s Work of the Beast (1638) and Christian Man’s Triall (1641) (among many other titles by Lilburne), but it also includes retrospective, firstperson histories such as Bishop Hall’s Hard Measure, first published with The Shaking of the Olive Tree: The Remaining Works of that Incomparable Prelate, Joseph Hall (1660). What all these works have in common is that they are straightforward historical accounts , interested in factual details more than inner states. For a fuller discussion of the differences between the kinds of autobiography permitted by lyric and polemic, see Chapter 2; for more on spiritual autobiography, see Chapter 5, as well as subsequent discussion in this Introduction. 8. Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity, and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1993), 3; Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society Under the Tudors (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1993), 256–62. See also Patrick Collinson, Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), ix, 140. 9. For more on contemporary responses to James’s succession, see Chapter 1. 10. Francis Bacon is the usual source for this quotation. See Patrick Collinson, “Elizabeth I,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, 2008). 11. For the importance of attending to the texture of language when reading early autobiographical works, see Stephen M. Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace: Self-Representation and Authority (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 12–13; Meredith Anne Skura, Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 8–9. 12. The term “disnarrative” is the coinage of the narratologist Gerald Prince, whose...