In this volume a team of international contributors explore the way modern conceptions of what constitutes an individual's life-story emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The Enlightenment idea of the self--an autonomous individual, testing rules imposed from without against a personal sensibility nourished from within--is today vigorously contested. By analysing early-modern 'life writing' in all its variety, from private diaries and correspondences to public confessions and philosophical portraits, this volume shows that the relation between self and community is more complex and more intimate than supposed.