Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material / Claudia Ulbrich , Kaspar von Greyerz and Lorenz Heiligensetzer -- Introduction / Claudia Ulbrich , Kaspar von Greyerz and Lorenz Heiligensetzer -- 1 From the Individual to the Person: Challenging Autobiography Theory / Gabriele Jancke and Claudia Ulbrich -- 2 Observations on the Historiographical Status of Research on Self-Writing / Kaspar von Greyerz -- 3 Swiss-German Self-Narratives: The Archival Project as a Rich Vein of Research / Lorenz Heiligensetzer -- 4 Private Body – What Do Self-Narratives Bring to the History of the Body? / Gudrun Piller -- 5 “I will Wake the Maidens, They shall Prepare Soup for You” – Food as a Code in the Autobiography of Thomas Platter / Angela Heimen -- 6 Autobiographical Texts: Acting within a Network: Observations on Genre and Power Relations in the German-Speaking Regions from 1400 to 1620 / Gabriele Jancke -- 7 Condemning Oneself to Death: The Semantics of Suicide in Self-Narratives of the German Enlightenment / Andreas Bähr -- 8 Pitfalls in Reading Popular Self-Narratives: Biographical Reconfigurations and Self-Censure in the Autobiography of a Pedlar, Small Farmer and Weaver from Eastern Switzerland, Gregorius Aemisegger (1815–1913) / Fabian Brändle -- 9 Family and House Books in Late Medieval German-Speaking Areas: A Research Overview / Claudia Ulbrich -- 10 Autobiography in Economic History / Thomas Max Safley -- 11 Family Politics, Family Networks and the “Familial Self”: Sibling Letters in Seventeenth Century German High Aristocracy / Sophie Ruppel -- 12 Scrabbling Mice, a Visit from Hades and Thoughts of Death: The Autobiography of Lucas Forcart-Respinger, a Merchant from Basel (1789–1869) / Patricia Zihlmann-Märki -- Index of Persons / Claudia Ulbrich , Kaspar von Greyerz and Lorenz Heiligensetzer -- Index of Places / Claudia Ulbrich , Kaspar von Greyerz and Lorenz Heiligensetzer.

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In Mapping the ‘I’ , Research on Self Narratives in Germany and Switzerland, the contributors, working with egodocuments (autobiographies, diaries, family chronicles and related texts), discuss various approaches to early modern concepts of the person and of personhood, the place of individuality within this context, genre and practices of writing. The volume documents the cooperation between the Berlin and Basel self-narrative research groups during its first phase (2000-2007). Next to addressing crucial methodological issues, it also demonstrates the richness of egodocuments as historical sources in contributions concentrating, for example, on the body and illness, on food, as well as on the early modern economy, group cultures and autobiographical considerations of one's own suicide. Contributors include Andreas Bähr, Fabian Brändle, Lorenz Heiligensetzer, Angela Heimen, Gabriele Jancke, Gudrun Piller, Sophie Ruppel, Thomas M. Safley, Claudia Ulbrich, Kaspar von Greyerz, and Patricia Zihlmann-Märki.