‘Self‐confidence and Self‐Conceit Render Men Fools’: Seventeenth‐Century ‘Self‐’ Compounds, Puritan Discourse and Early Modern Subjectivity☆

Abstract

AbstractThe unprecedented enlargement of the English lexicon in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries included a conspicuous group of new compounds with ‘self’ as the first element. After only a handful of such compounds in Middle English, nearly 150 were coined in the sixteenth century, and then an astonishing 600 or so in the seventeenth (approaching half of all such compounds recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary). This sudden obsession with one compounded element is unparalleled in English lexical history. It signals a very significant conceptual and ideological shift, one which we might expect to herald modernity's positive emphasis on subjectivity and individuality. However, these compounds came into being to express not the potentiality and value of individual experience but deep anxiety and wariness about ‐ even loathing and castigation of ‐ the self as the primary tool of Satan: Adam and Eve fell though becoming ‘selfists’. This paper explores this disquiet through discussion of a range of such compounds recorded in OED from Puritan texts, to conclude that they articulated not a growing confidence in the self and encouragement to self‐reliance and self‐realisation, but a drive towards self‐abnegation and subjection.