Rare or Not?

In response to:

A Most Particular Life from the March 26, 2026 issue

To the Editors:

Catherine Nicholson has written a wonderful account of Beloved Son Felix [“A Most Particular Life,” NYR, March 26], evidently a wonderful book, which I look forward to reading in full. But as a kind of autobiography it is not quite such a rare undertaking in the Renaissance as she implies. There is the wonderful Book of Songs and Sonetts, which was published in 1960, edited by James Osborn as The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne, who was an almost exact contemporary of Felix Platter in England and also a lute player. This has the added interest of giving a real idea of how contemporary English was actually pronounced since Whythorne uses his own special phonetic orthography. There is also the slightly later autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), which was indeed more or less written as an autobiography looking back at his early life. This has been widely mocked as showing Herbert as vaingloriously self-absorbed but I am inclined to regard it as a more serious work with a value system of honor that nowadays seems to many as comic, but which was taken seriously enough at the time for him to be appointed ambassador to France by James I.

David Van Edwards
President of the Lute Society Sharnbrook, Bedfordshire United Kingdom

I confess that when I wrote about how unusual Felix Platter’s diary is for its time, I was half hoping someone would write in with additional examples. Many thanks for reminding me about Thomas Whythorne, whose Songs and Sonetts features as a case study in Meredith Anne Skura’s excellent Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness (2008). Skura places Whythorne alongside sixteenth-century poets like John Skelton, Thomas Wyatt, Isabella Whitney, and George Gascoigne, whose first-person lyrics project richly textured (and often combative) subjectivities into verse; Whythorne goes one step further, adapting the capacious form of the verse miscellany to a wide-ranging prose account of “the cause why I wrote them,” in the course of which he claims to “lay open…the most part of all my private affairs and secrets.” The result, as Skura says, “is far looser and baggier and much more personal than any other surviving collection of verse.” Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s Life swaggers, blusters, and charms like Cellini’s, which is probably why Horace Walpole adored them both. He had an edition of Herbert printed on his private press and reported that “people [were] mad after it”—I share the belief that it’s well worth reading today! The key point isn’t that Felix was singular—though his voice, I think, rather is—but that first-person accounts of private lives before 1600 or so are precious resources and rare pleasures wherever we can find them.