The Writing of Daily Life
This chapter argues that the growing importance of financial documentation in early modernity shaped the form and content of vernacular writing. Focusing on the diary, it traces links between journals and accounts from early Renaissance Florence through seventeenth-century England, showing how notebook culture spread in response to financial pressures. Ultimately, the extension of monetary relations in early capitalist England gave men and women new reasons to record apparently trivial details of their daily lives, which now appeared in lists of expenses, debts, and accounts. The chapter thus contributes to debates about English economic individualism and the origins of realist prose; in addition, it shows how practical documents served as a vector for transmitting financial imperatives to literary history.