Post-Reformation Deliberation: From Renaissance Self-Fashioning to Reformed Self-Adjudication

Studies of the self in Renaissance scholarship have long explored the way individuals negotiated their self-identity within the confines of external forces. Some scholars have probed further, seeking to reclaim more individual agency, especially for women in Renaissance England. This paper will explore how English Calvinists in the Post-Reformation sought to guard against the individual falling into disengaged autonomy on the one hand and submergence within communal identities on the other. It identifies a turn from the reigning paradigm of elite self-fashioning to a sophisticated process of self-adjudication, from weighing various testimonies through ecclesiastical and civil jurisprudence to the application of these deliberative practices across different courts and contexts, extending upwards to synods and downwards to local society, including to the self within the courtroom of the individual conscience.