This article argues that many traditional historical narratives of individualism have been reproduced in more recent discussions of the self and selfhood, and that attempts to discover a point at which the ‘modern’ self came into existence have been hampered by such assumptions. To provide an alternative to these approaches, discussions of the self in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries will be examined. Eschewing overarching narratives, the discussion will focus on how neo-stoic sources were employed in the context of challenges to traditional forms of the humanist ethics of office-holding. Such ideas, important in writers like Montaigne, Pierre Charron, and William Cornwallis, have been associated with an idea of ‘new humanism’, but this article aims to discuss with precision how they relate to early modern ethical discussion. Here an insight can be gained into a particular philosophical development of the idea of the self. This can be more productive than some recent ‘new historicist’, or sociological, approaches to the literature of this period, which tend to the deconstruction of a particular set of sources through the use of the self as a theoretical heuristic.
